"Academics last night accused the Catholic Church of "mis-management and indifference" after staff shortages forced the closure of the Scottish Catholic Archives, in the latest blow to one of the country's most prized historical resources.

Columba House in Edinburgh, which houses the archives, has closed its doors indefinitely because there is no-one left to look after the service.

Curator, Andrew Nicholl, has been absent on long-term sick leave – which The Herald understands is due to the stress of the current shake-up of the archives. Just days ago, his assistant was told by the Church to leave immediately rather than work out a month's notice after she submitted her resignation.

Her departure left the archives unmanned, and researchers who had made appointments to view documents were given just 24 hours' notice that the service was being closed.

It comes amid controversial moves to uproot the archives – which contain more than a million documents dating back 800 years, including letters from Mary Queen of Scots and papers relating to Oscar Wilde – from their home in Edinburgh and distribute them to various locations across Scotland.

Professor Tom Devine, Scotland's most prominent historian, said: "Whatever the merit of the decision to disperse the Scottish Catholic Archives – and they are few to the point of invisibility –- this development is the latest in a long line of mismanage....."
Helen McArdle, HeraldScotland, 29.6.2012

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sliderule.PickettN902T.agr.jpg

Photo Arnold Reinhold
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

Springer Images's policy seems to be: If it's in a Springer Journal, take it, make money with it and don't make a diligent copyright check. "We have enough money for sporadic complaints if an author doesn't accepts our thefts".

According to the first illustration of the Wikipedia article on Copyfraud this can be labelled as Copyfraud although Jason Mazzone may prefer a stricter definition (only falsely claiming copyright for the public domain).

See also the deletion discussion for the mentioned first illustration
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:WP_on_Getty_images_with_watermark.jpg

See also
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/97051246/

http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/06/07/springergate-i-try-to-explain-springerimages-and-my-continuing-concern/ (and more entries there)

Update:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-06-11/Special_report

http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/06/13/springergate-springer-replies/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgc0o5LmX1A

Daniel Reetz, founder of DIY Book Scanner, developed a high-speed book scanning system using open source technology, cheap cameras and garbage. In this talk he presents case studies from the DiY community, and fosters discussion on how the future of digital books can address unmet needs.

Text version: http://www.nyls.edu/user_files/1/3/4/17/49/1080/55-1%20Final%20Reetz%2011.17.10.pdf
In: New York Law School Review, Volume 55, Issue 1 (2010-11): http://www.nyls.edu/index.php?cID=2789

DIY Book Scanner: http://www.diybookscanner.org/

Daniel Reetz: http://www.danreetz.com/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/may/23/text-mining-research-tool-forbidden

"Researchers push for end to publishers' default ban on computer scanning of tens of thousands of papers to find links between genes and diseases"

Via
http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/05/30/guardian-article-on-content-mining-thanks-alok-jha-makes-it-mainstream/

Graf, Klaus, Thatcher, Sandy (2012). Point & Counterpoint: Is CC BY the Best Open Access License?. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 1(1):eP1043.
Available at: http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss1/5

Many thanks to Isaac Gilman who transformed my English in something readable!

My opinion piece is licensed under CC-BY while Mr Thatcher's text has the CC-BY-NC license. I reproduce here only my part:

"The only aim of scholarly communication should be the widest possible distribution of knowledge and scholarly results. In order for
this to be possible, published research—which scholars give away for
free to publishers—should be open access. And in this context, “gratis” open access (free to access) isn’t enough; only “libre” open access, which removes permission barriers, allows the widest distribution of knowledge.

Before considering which Creative Commons license best meets this
requirement, it is worth considering the role of copyright in general.
We should ask whether copyright even has a valid function in the
context of science and scholarship. Ideas, principles and scientific
results aren’t protected by the copyright. And reputation is the currency in science, not money. No researcher needs an incentive (such as that provided in copyright law) to do research or to publish his results. Copyright, with its restrictions, simply isn’t an appropriate instrument in this sector. “The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain,” says the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2001), “should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”

The Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) is the license
which best fits this description—as well as the criteria of the other
authoritative Open Access definitions of Bethesda and Berlin (2001-
2003), and the definition of the Open Knowledge Foundation [1]. CC
BY is the “little brother” of the public domain; it makes re-use as easy as possible (the attribution requirement is not a significant barrier).

Furthermore, CC BY is accepted as the means of ensuring libre open
access by the most prestigious open access publishers: Public Library of Science and BioMedCentral (now part of Springer). If Hindawi and other publishers who use the CC BY license are included, there must be thousands of authors using the license (keep in mind that, since 2003, PloS has published since nearly 50,000 articles). If there are problems with this license, they are not apparent.

Others say that other Creative Commons licenses/terms, like No Derivatives or Non-Commercial Use, are just as appropriate for open content. However:

• No Derivatives (ND) isn’t an option for scholarly publications. Scholars and scientists build upon the work of their
predecessors, to stand on their shoulders. To forbid derivative
works doesn’t make sense if science and scholarship are to be
seen as collaborative work.

• Non-Commercial Use (NC) isn’t an option either. To choose a
non-commercial license would mean that, e.g., an image in a
CC BY-NC journal could not be re-used in a scholarly journal
published by a commercial publisher. Course pack use of NC
articles is also problematic if the university acts commercially
and charges for the course. And let’s not forget: commercial
use can mean more impact for a work.

CC BY also solves the problem of orphan (or semi-orphan) works.
Some countries like Germany don’t have full copyright transfer to
publishers. Contacting authors is therefore necessary in order to obtain re-use rights. However, it can be difficult to find scientific authors because of the common use of initials instead of first names in article metadata. And in the humanities (which do use first names) it isn’t always easy to get current contact information 10 or more years after an article is published.

There is, I must concede, some loss of control for authors when using the CC BY license. One can, for example, publish a translation of an article without asking the author, and the author may not like the translation. But this is a minor disadvantage given the great potential of this license. To quote Google in regard to its Public Domain Books: “Your imagination is the limit.” We cannot know the possible benefits in the next decades but we know (especially from the example of orphan works) that permission barriers are evil.
The “all rights reserved” approach isn’t a substitute for ethical conduct in science or scholarship. The CC BY license is the expression of a culture of respect and appropriate attribution, while “all rights reserved” is a ridiculous attempt to try to control things you cannot control and to ignore the fact that the rules of the copyright system and the rules of the research community are different. All research results should be made CC BY (and all data CC 0).

If open access, then libre open access. If libre open access, then CC
BY!"

[1] http://opendefinition.org/okd/

The journal editors have omitted the following link:

Further reading: http://access.okfn.org/

http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/home

No free license!

by Brewster Kahle and Rick Prelinger
in: technology review, May/June 2012

"Now is our chance to build an online library accessible to all. To equal the Boston Public Library or university libraries like those at Yale or Princeton, we need 10 million books. These could be acquired in four years for approximately $160 million. The DPLA, with its broad support, can help build this library system, or it could end up building an overly centralized library by using collective licensing systems like the Book Rights Registry. If we work together, we can achieve universal access to knowledge by building on the positive lessons of the Internet and World Wide Web."

http://www.technologyreview.com/article/40261/

Brewster Kahle is the founder of the Internet Archive. Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer, and filmmaker.

via Blog of Internet Archive:
http://blog.archive.org/2012/05/11/many-libraries-as-the-worlds-books-go-online-we-must-resist-centralization-technology-review-published-by-mit/

The records of the Irish chancery were destroyed on 30 June 1922 in an explosion and fire in the Public Record Office of Ireland, located at the Four Courts, Dublin. Among the most important classes of record destroyed were the medieval Irish chancery rolls.

CIRCLE is the culmination of nearly four decades of work reconstructing these lost records. It brings together all known letters enrolled on the Irish chancery rolls during the Middle Ages (1244–1509) drawing on originals, facsimiles, transcripts and calendars located in archival repositories in The Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, England and the USA.

The site contains over 20,000 Irish chancery letters translated from Latin into English, together with an unparalleled collection of digital images of surviving medieval chancery letters and rare printed volumes.

http://chancery.tcd.ie/