A Level Playing-Field For Publishers

Stuart Shieber has an interesting paper in PLoS Biology on the economics of open-access publishing. He observes the moral hazard implicit in the separation between the readers of peer-reviewed science and the libraries that pay the subscriptions to the publishers that make the peer review possible. His proposal to deal with this is that grant funders and institutions should make dedicated funds available to authors that can be used only for paying processing fees for open access journals. After all, he observes, these funders already support the subscriptions that allow subscription journals not to charge processing fees (although some still do charge such fees). His proposal would provide a more level playing field between subscription and open access publishing channels. Below the fold is my take on how we can measure the level-ness of this field.

How Green Is Digital Preservation?

At iPRES 2010 I was on a panel chaired by Neil Grindley of JISC entitled How Green is Digital Preservation?. Each of the panelists gave a very brief introduction; below the fold is an edited version of mine.

Reinforcing my point

Reinforcing the point I have made over and over and over again, that the threat of software and format obsolescence is vastly over-blown, here is a year-old Slashdot story pointing to a contemporary blog post listing a selection of ancient operating systems that simply refuse to die, with comments providing many more examples.

Yet more bad news about disks

Chris Mellor at The Register reviews the prospects for the 4TB disk generation and reports that manufacturers are finding the transition to the technologies it needs more difficult and expensive than expected.

This reinforces the argument of my earlier post, based on Dave Anderson's presentation (PDF) to the 2009 Library of Congress Storage workshop, that the exponential drop in cost per byte we expect from disks is about to flatten out.

JCDL 2010 Keynote

On June 23 I gave a keynote address entitled to the joint JCDL/IACDL 2010 conference at Surfer's Paradise in Queensland, Australia. Below the fold is an edited text of the talk, with links to the resources.

Even more bad news about disks

I attended the 25th (plus one) anniversary celebrations for the Andrew project at Carnegie-Mellon University. As part of these James Gosling gave a talk. He stressed the importance of parallelism in programming, reinforcing the point with a graph of CPU clock rate against time. For many years, clock rate increased. Some years ago, it stopped increasing. Did Moore's Law stop working? Not at all, there were no strong technological barriers to increasing the clock rate. What happened was that increasing the clock rate stopped being a way to make money. Mass-market customers wanted lower power, lower price CPUs, not faster ones. So that's what the manufacturers made.

Follow me below the fold to see the analogous phenomenon happening to disks, and why this is bad news for digital preservation.

Spring CNI Plenary: The Video

CNI has now posted the video of Cliff Lynch's introduction, my plenary presentation, and the questions.

How Are We Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents? from CNI Video Editor on Vimeo.

I gave a significantly shortened version of this talk at the Sun PASIG meeting in Malta June 26.