Win for Open Access: U. of California system cancels all Elsevier subscriptions

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that, after months of negotiations, the University of California's 10-campus system has cancelled its subscriptions with Elsevier - one of the largest academic publishers in the world. The previous 5 year contract with Elsevier had cost about $50 million.
In a press release, the UC Office of the President stated that "As a leader in the global movement toward open access to publicly funded research, the University of California is taking a firm stand by deciding not to renew its subscriptions with Elsevier. Despite months of contract negotiations, Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC’s key goal: securing universal open access to UC research while containing the rapidly escalating costs associated with for-profit journals." A member of the negotiation team is quoted as saying, "Make no mistake: The prices of scientific journals now are so high that not a single university in the U.S. — not the University of California, not Harvard, no institution — can afford to subscribe to them all. Publishing our scholarship behind a paywall deprives people of the access to and benefits of publicly funded research. That is terrible for society.”
The University of California had asked for contract terms that would integrate subscription charges and open access publishing fees, making open access the default for any article by a UC scholar and stabilizing journal costs for the university.

Lexis news: chatbots & bubbles are coming

Bob Ambrogi reports on the news from a a Legalweek media briefing he attended- Lexis Advance will soon have "chatbots" guiding our research and "speaking" with users via a chat bubble. He has an iPhone photo of what this will look like. Mr. Ambrogi also spoke with LexisNexis product developers at Legalweek to learn more about the chatbots and how they will be used.

"When the researcher is exploring an unfamiliar area or topic of law (t)he bot can be like an electronic mentor, guiding the researcher to the sources people typically look at for that topic.
We see in the future an interaction with Lexis Advance that is highly conversational,” Pfeifer said. “You ask a question, we present results. The interaction becomes more human-like."

The Report of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Pennsylvania's Election Security

Pitt Law Prof. David Hickton has just shared the Report of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Pennsylvania's Election Security (72 page pdf) which he chaired. From the announcement:

The 2016 elections revealed the vulnerability of the U.S. election system. This is especially true in Pennsylvania, where the vast majority of the voting systems are simply unable to provide the assurances of security and reliability our citizens deserve.
We formed this commission with the belief that with study and practicality, we would be able to identify achievable solutions for the Commonwealth’s election security. Solutions that ensure that all of us—regardless of precinct or party—can have faith in our elections. After an eight-month study and consultations with a range of experts and the public, we have done just that.
Implementing the recommendations in this report will allow Pennsylvania to be better prepared to manage the cyber threats that targeted us in the past—and anticipate the ones of the future. We urge officials throughout Pennsylvania to address the policy and funding aspects of these risks in a clear-eyed manner.

Access to government info during the shutdown

Over on the Free Government Information blog, James R. Jacobs posts an excellent article about the information access problems caused by the federal government shutdown. He notes that "There are at least two reasons why users cannot get the documents they need from government servers during the shutdown. In some cases, agencies have apparently shut off access to their documents. (This is the case for both NIST and CSRC.) In other cases, the security certificates of websites have expired — with no agency employees to renew them! — leaving whole websites either insecure or unavailable or both."
But he goes beyond this explanation to say that the loss of access was forseeable and avoidable because libraries, especially FDLP libraries, make decisions about how we select and preserve government documents.

"...too many libraries have chosen to adopt a new model of “services without collections.” GPO proudly promotes this model as “All or Mostly Online Federal Depository Libraries.” GPO itself is affected by this model. Almost 20% of the PURLs in CGP point to content on non-GPO government servers. So, even though GPO’s govinfo database and catalog of government publications (CGP) may still be up and running, during the shut-down GPO cannot ensure that all its “Permanent URLs” (PURLs) will work.
This no-collections-model means that libraries are too often choosing simply to point to collections over which they have no control — and we’ve known what happens “When we depend on pointing instead of collecting” for quite some time. When those collections go offline and users lose access, users begin to wonder why someone hasn’t foreseen this problem and put “all those publications somewhere public.”

Entire editorial board of Elsevier journal resigns

Nature has a story titled "Open-access row prompts editorial board of Elsevier journal to resign: "The board of the Journal of Informetrics has launched a new open-access publication." The International Society for Informetrics and Scientometrics has more:

Over the last few years, the editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics (JOI) has grown increasingly dissatisfied with Elsevier’s actions and policies. While some of those have specific effects on our field—such as Elsevier’s refusal to participate in the Initiative for Open Citation (I4OC)—others are affecting all fields of science—such as its restrictive open access policies and prohibitive subscription costs. The editorial board of JOI expressed these concerns to Elsevier on numerous occasions, with no success. Given the inability of Elsevier to address these issues, the editorial board unanimous resigned on January 10th 2019. As of January 12th 2019, names of associate editors and editorial board members have been removed from the website of the Journal of Informetrics."

You can read the entire resignation letter here. The group of editors that resigned has launched a new, freely available journal called Quantitative Science Studies (QSS). It is being published by MIT Press.

A font to help you remember...

WIRED magazine has an article titled "Can't Remember What You Read? Blame the Font, Not Forgetfulness." The font, named "Sans Forgetica," was developed at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia. According to their website,

Sans Forgetica is a font is a downloadable font that is scientifically designed using the principles of cognitive psychology to help you to better remember your study notes. It was created by a multidisciplinary team of designers and behavioural scientists from RMIT University.

WIRED says that "Sans Forgetica is purposefully hard to decipher, forcing the reader to focus. One study found that students recalled 57 percent of what they read in Sans Forgetica, compared with 50 percent of the material in Arial, a significant difference. No word yet on the retention rate of Comic Sans." You can download it for free from the RMIT website. There is also a Chrome extension that you can download and use to display any text on the web in the Sans Forgetica font. Here's what it looks like:

article: "Law Schools are Bad for Democracy"

There is a lengthy article in the Chronicle of Higher Education Review today authored by Samuel Moyn, a professor at Yale Law School, with the title Law Schools are Bad for Democracy: They whitewash the grubby scramble for power.
The author spells out a number of shortcomings of what law schools do; he says "Law school allows for doing well. But does it allow for doing good?"
He then suggests that there are "two especially imperative fixes" that can help law schools change for the better:

The first involves how law schools prove to their newest entrants that the institutions really are the pluralistic spaces they nervously claim to be, rather than factories for mass conversion of pliant subjects into large-firm lawyers.... And for the sake of our national life, law schools must take up the duty of inculcating in their students and in the public a critical attitude toward the operations of "the rule of law" in general — including a critical attitude toward the routine exaltation of the judiciary...What is lacking in public discussions about law school is attention to what it means for legal elites to serve the democratic conversation about how the people rules itself. Rather than burnishing the credentials of law and its royal judicial stewards, we should insist on the centrality of the people in a democratic legal order."

University of California takes on Elsevier journal subscription fees

Both the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education have stories about how the University of California system is trying to leverage its massive amount of research output - almost 10% of the research output of the United States - to negotiate fees with academic publishing giant Elsevier. The UC system's five year subscription contract with Elsevier ends on December 31. In a letter to faculty, "campus officials asked faculty members to consider declining to review articles for Elsevier journals until negotiations 'are clearly moving in a productive direction.' The letter also asked professors to consider publishing research elsewhere, including in prestigious open-access journals. The California system wants to fundamentally alter how it pays for journal content from publishers like Elsevier and to accelerate open-access publishing in the process.

Data visualization: world population

The Pudding is a blog that uses visual essays to explain ideas debated in culture. A recent post is titled "Population Mountains" and looks at the population of the world in a 3D format so that big cities look like tall mountains. It's a very interesting perspective. As the author says, it can be "eye-opening to see how the world’s population is so unevenly distributed... What stands out is each city’s form, a unique mountain that might be like the steep peaks of lower Manhattan or the sprawling hills of suburban Atlanta. When I first saw a city in 3D, I had a feel for its population size that I had never experienced before."

hat tip: Pat Roncevich

Lexis announces Context on Lexis Advance

According to the announcement,

Context is a new kind of analytics tool that expands the power of legal research using industry-leading AI, language processing and data-mining technology to capture and analyze millions of case law documents so users can pinpoint the exact language a judge will find convincing and uncover an expert’s strengths and weaknesses through a few clicks versus hours of research.

And faculty now have early access to Context to check it out - in the hope that when faculty see how it works they will want to integrate it into the curriculum. Lexis suggests possible uses include advanced legal research, legal technology and skills related courses, clinics, judicial internships, moot court, and summer associate or prepare to practice workshops. Students will get access in January.
To access Context, sign in to Lexis Advance and select Context from the product grid in the upper left-hand corner. For an overview, you can download this flyer or watch this short video about the product on the Lexis YouTube channel.
In addition, Legaltech News has a review of Context with more info.

FDSYS WEBSITE WILL BE RETIRED ON DECEMBER 14

GPO plans to retire GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys) website and replace it with govinfo on Friday December 14, 2018. When the FDsys website is retired existing links will automatically redirect to govinfo. Other GPO websites will not be affected by the FDsys retirement.
There's more info about the transition on the govinfo website.

Laws on Erasure of Online Information.

The Law Library of Congress has just published a report titled Laws on Erasure of Online Information (62 page pdf). This report describes the laws of twelve jurisdictions that have some form of remedy available enabling the removal of online data based on harm to individuals’ privacy or reputational interests, including but not limited to defamation. Six of the countries surveyed are within the European Union (EU) or the European Economic Area, and therefore have implemented EU law. Five non-EU jurisdictions are also surveyed. A comparative summary is included. From the Summary:

"The right to erasure (right to be forgotten) forms part of the right to personal data protection, which is a fundamental right in the European Union. It is codified in article 17 of the General Data Protection Regulation, which intends to update and clarify the right to erasure for the digital age...The right to the protection of personal data is not an absolute right and must be balanced against other fundamental rights, such as the freedom of expression and information."

A few Veteran's Day resources

Word War I documents from the Government Publishing Office (GPO):
The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) has digitized the 17-volume set, United States Army in the World War, 1917-1919, in recognition of the 100th anniversary of the end of the conflict, and made it available on govinfo. Published in 1948, this publication compiles key documents, maps, and records for the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) from the start of the American involvement in World War I through the occupation of Germany. This publication offers a glimpse into the organization and operations of the AEF through primary source documents compiled by the Historical Division, U.S. Army.
WWII Office of Strategic Services maps website:
At Stanford University, the Branner Earth Sciences Map Library has mounted an exhibit about the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) maps that were created during World War II. the exhibit includes scans of 770 OSS maps as well as several reports and background and history regarding the OSS map making activities. The Office of Strategic Services was formed in June 1942 in response to the entry of the United States into World War II. This was a time of codification of efforts around the collection of intelligence information in order to more effectively understand and respond to the events of the day. This effort brought together a number of experts, many from academia including a large number of cartographers. These cartographers created maps on demand that either stood alone or were part of reports. The maps were eventually distributed through the Federal Depository Library Program to libraries throughout the United States. The best estimate is that 5,753 unique maps were produced of which Stanford Libraries holds over 700.

hat tip: James Jacobs

GPO statute compilations

The FDLP has announced that the "Government Publishing Office (GPO) has released an initial set of 40 Statute Compilations as a pilot on govinfo, GPO’s website that offers public access to Federal Government information."
These are compilations of public laws that either do not appear in the U.S. Code or that have been classified to a title of the U.S. Code that has not been enacted into positive law. Each Statute Compilation incorporates the amendments made to the underlying statute since it was originally enacted.
When legislation cites or amends a statutory provision that is not part of a positive law title of the U.S. Code, the citation or amendment must be to the underlying statute, not to the U.S. Code. Statute Compilations are a useful drafting aid in these circumstances; however, they are not official documents and should not be cited as evidence of the law. The official version of Federal law is found in the United States Statutes at Large and in the U.S. Code, the legal effect of which is established in sections 112 and 204, respectively, of title 1, United States Code.
 Some public laws have more than one “short title” by which the law may be cited. In such a case, it may be necessary to scroll through a Statute Compilation to locate the portion that corresponds to the short title by which the Statute Compilation is listed in this collection.

Caselaw Access Project launched

From Adam Ziegler: "Thrilled today to announce the launch of https://case.law , a free public access point for 6.4M+ state and federal court decisions spanning our nation's entire history! The Caselaw Access Project (“CAP”) expands public access to U.S. law." 
The goal is to make all published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public online, in a consistent format, digitized from the collection of the Harvard Law Library, with the help of Ravellaw.
At https://api.case.law you'll find a browsable API that offers open access to descriptive metadata for the entire corpus. API documentation is at https://case.law/api/ -- written to be friendly to experts and beginners alike.

Webinar on Presidential Research Resources

The librarians at "Help! I'm an Accidental Government Information Librarian" are offering a new webinar on Presidential resources.  The webinar will discuss digital and archival resources for Presidential Research with librarians and archivists from the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington and Seton Hall University. The presenters will include Rebecca Baird, Archivist, Mount Vernon Ladies' Association (MVLA), Sheila Blackford, Librarian, Scripps Library, Miller Center, University of Virginia, Lisa DeLuca, Social Sciences Librarian, Seton Hall University, and Katherine Hoarn, Special Collections Librarian, The Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon. The webinar is on Weds. Nov. 7th from noon to 1:00 pm. Registration is free; register here.

A win for the open law movement

The ABA Journal reports that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit has unanimously ruled that Georgia’s official annotated state code is not copyrightable and belongs in the public domain. The case was an appeal by well-known open law advocate Carl Malamud and his foundation Public.Resource.org. In 2017 an Atlanta federal judge in the Northern District of Georgia had ruled that the state of Georgia can copyright annotations to its official state code and that Public.Resource.org cannot print those annotations on its website without a license (244 F. Supp. 3d 1350). The 11th Circuit court overturned that ruling. From the opinion:

Today, we are presented with the question of whether the annotations contained in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated (OCGA), authored by the Georgia General Assembly and made an inextricable part of the official codification of Georgia’s laws, may be copyrighted by the State of Georgia. Answering this question means confronting profound and difficult issues about the nature of law in our society and the rights of citizens to have unfettered access to the legal edicts that govern their lives. After a thorough review of the law, and an examination of the annotations, we conclude that no valid copyright interest can be asserted in any part of the OCGA.
we conclude that the annotations in the OCGA are sufficiently law-like so as to be properly regarded as a sovereign work. Like the statutory text itself, the annotations are created by the Case: 17-11589 Date Filed: 10/19/2018 Page: 4 of 58 5 duly constituted legislative authority of the State of Georgia. Moreover, the annotations clearly have authoritative weight in explicating and establishing the meaning and effect of Georgia’s laws. Furthermore, the procedures by which the annotations were incorporated bear the hallmarks of legislative process, namely bicameralism and presentment.

Open Access Week

To celebrate "Open Access Week," several events are scheduled at Pitt this week and next. Open Access @ Pitt will be hosting a number of events, beginning tomorrow with a program on “Preprints and the Future of Scholarship” at 4 pm. . On Tuesday of next week, another open access event, “Human Rights and Info Access in a Digital World,” will feature Mike Madison and two other distinguished panelists.
What is it? From the Open Access Week website:

"Open Access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder. OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance. Just as authors of journal articles donate their labor, so do most journal editors and referees participating in peer review. OA literature is not free to produce, even if it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature. The question is not whether scholarly literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers. Business models for paying the bills depend on how OA is delivered."

The website also has resources and materials of anyone interested in Open Access available in useful handouts:
What Faculty can do to support Open Access
What Librarians can do to promote Open Access
What Research Funders can do to promote Open Access
What Universities and Administrators can do to promote Open Access.

New Pitt Print Station in the law school!

Pitt Law's IT Department has announced that a new Pitt Print Station is coming to the Lobby of the Barco Law Building. Good news for students - especially since it will be able to do both B&W and COLOR printing!

IPUMS webinar

There will be a live webinar on Friday, October 26 at 10 am titled "An Introduction to IPUMS." Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) provides census and survey data from around the world integrated across time and space. IPUMS makes it easy to study change, conduct comparative research, merge information across data types, and analyze individuals within family and community context. The webinar was organized by the Organized by the Government Publications Librarians of New England government information group in partnership with IPUMS and the Government Publishing Office (GPO). No registration is required; you can just log in here.