Google Scholar: The Pros and Cons for Maritime Scholars

Mainstream academia, particularly the sciences, rely heavily on publication "impact factor." Will that work for academics in the maritime sector?

One tool for measuring how important an article has been to the extension of academic knowledge is the impact factor. There are different methods for calculating impact, but most involve measuring the number of times a work is cited in the works of others, and where. Journal impact is measured as well as that of authors. Thus, an author typically gets a higher impact ranking for having published in higher impact journals.

Until a few years ago, the ability to measure scholarly impact required a subscription to data services like Scopus or Web of Knowledge. These services still represent the gold standard of impact measurement, especially in the scientific community, but with the advent of Google Scholar, authors can see how their works measure up without having to pay for the privilege.  Furthermore, because Google is less restrictive in the publications it includes, academic researchers outside the hard sciences have a better chance of getting a score, or scoring higher, than they would in the commercial ranking services. Anyone can sign up, search for citations, and add them to their Scholar profile. Google does the rest, adding the number of times cited, links to the citations, the h-index, the i10-index, and even a bar graph of each year the author's works have been cited.

Publications that do not show up in search results can be added manually, although such entries will have no impact until they start showing up in Google Scholar searches and have been linked to other works. Google's manual forms allow users to enter data for books, chapters, articles, conference proceedings, patents, and "other." There are no fields for standard publication numbers, such as an article's document object identifier (DOI), a periodical's international standard series number (ISSN),  or the international standard book number (ISBN). What this likely means is that, without this precise identification number, a publication that had to be entered manually will never be linked to an impact factor. If and when the citation shows up in Google Scholar, the author will have to add the citation from Google to his or her profile, and delete the manually added entry that it supersedes.

For maritime academics there are two particular drawbacks with Google Scholar. The first is that, because the maritime sector is so small, impact is almost by definition exceedingly limited. A Venn diagram of publications having to do with maritime affairs and the entire world of academic publishing could be represented as a pencil dot within a giant circle several pages in diameter. A better measurement would be the impact within the maritime sector. This leads to the second problem, namely, the lack of standardized metadata in maritime publications that would facilitate the cross-referencing needed to determine a given work's relevance to other works. Without standards-based formatting for author names, publishers, volumes, editions, etc., upon which computer algorithms can act, even a long and respectable list of published articles and papers would produce an impact factor of zero.

We should also note that Google's format limitations do not account for numerous other contributions that faculty can make to maritime knowledge. For example, a conference presentation that results in international policy changes might never have reached the stage of published proceedings, or at least not with a high impact, brand name publisher. There is no form to fill out for presentations, only papers in published proceedings. Likewise, there is no place to enter grant projects, consultancies, and guest lectures. These activities and accomplishments can make for an impressive Curriculum Vitae that, in the maritime world, could easily outweigh the impact of a publication list with a moderate h-index.

Certainly, wherever it is appropriate, maritime faculty should be encouraged to sign up for Google Scholar and add their citations. But they should keep in mind that it is not intended to be an online version of their complete CV. And administrators in maritime academics should also keep in mind that it is not a complete measure of impact in the maritime world. Martin Stopford, whose Maritime Economic is likely the most widely used text on the subject, has a Google h-index factor of 7, which is less than 20% of the impact of an oceanographer with a career of publishing in respected scientific journals. Both authors are highly regarded in their areas of expertise, but the one with the lower impact factor in Google Scholar would almost assuredly be judged to have the higher impact among the community of academics dedicated to safe, secure, efficient shipping on clean oceans.

What the library can do for WMU alumni

Every year, as graduation approaches, we get asked about alumni access to library resources. Not long ago, the answer was easy --none-- because we did not have the technology in place to do much in the way of remote access. This has changed rapidly in the past year, but as far as alumni access is concerned, the answer has improved from none to not much. The obstacles at this point are legal, and ultimately, financial.

We hope, with help from alumni, that we can improve our support to them. At this point, we would like to make clear what access we can and can not provide to alumni, and why, and we will conclude with recommendations for improving our position. Let's start with the most obvious:

Lloyd's  List

WMU Library at this time can not legally give alumni online access to Lloyd's List. A subscription to Lloyd's web site lists for  £1955 per person per year. Lloyd's offers discounted institutional site licensing for thirty-five thousand pounds, which is a better deal, but still expensive. The last time we spoke with a Lloyd's representative on the phone, he was willing to extend access to all enrolled students, but not to alumni, for sixteen thousand pounds. That is as low as they are willing to go. Lloyd's believes what they sell is worth what they are asking, but it is still too costly for us to to provide simultaneous access to everyone on campus, let alone to all graduates.

Most of the popular trade journals fall into the same category as Lloyd's, such as, American Shipper, Tradewinds, and Fairplay. We challenge them to institute a better pricing structure for online access, but in the mean time, we simply can not accomodate the desire of alumni to have gratis access via the WMU subscription. Keep in mind, however, that vistors, including visiting alumni, can access these titles from our on-campus archives.

Ebrary, Proquest, and other "academic databases"

We need to check with representatives of the individual databases. We lease "site-licenses" of these resources, meaning that everyone on campus, or authenticated in the campus system, can have access simultaneously. Very often the price is based on campus population. Keep in mind there is a big difference between 200 students (when we have two classes in session) and three thousand alumni. With some databases, three thousand users might be within our current subscription limits. In others, we would have to pay a higher fee.

Clarkson's

Not a chance. WMU gets a great deal for current students, for academic purposes only.

Refworks and Easybib

These services you can have lifelong as an alumnus of WMU. Any bibliographies you have made you may retain, as well as build new ones, and you can share them.

WMU Google Apps

As an alumnus, you may retain your WMU gmail, and use Google documents, and the other Google Apps that WMU has licensed. For access to associated third party applications, such as SlideRocket and LucidChart, alumni will have to contact WMU IT.

Reference services

WMU staff will try to assist with reference questions, if we have time. You can always ask, but the more specific your question the better chance of getting an answer. We could scan a book chapter or a journal article, but we will not be able to answer broad, open-ended research questions. We can point you to possible resources and suggest search strategies. Service to currently enrolled students will of course take precedence over alumni reference services.

Need for direction and funding from alumni association

It must be understood that whatever content and services the library currently does not offer to alumni is not on account of a lack of willingness to help. It is a matter of budget and copyright law. The latter can almost always be overcome if the former is sufficiently funded. A strong alumni association, perhaps with a standing committee on library or information services, is the first step in extending the service from this point. This committee should be capable of raising funds as well as setting the priorities to spend it. As for the library staff, with a sufficiently dedicated committee that can speak for alumni on matters of information access, we can work to provide access in one of the following ways, depending on the vendor with whom we are dealing:

• Permit alumni access at no additional cost. In the case of locally produced information, such as conference proceeding papers, dissertations, and maritime information on the open web that we have captured and cataloged, that access is guaranteed. In the case of commercial databases, if three thousand users are within the limits of a current contract, then by all means, we shall accomodate alumni with access to that particular database or service. The library staff needs to identify the resources that fall into this category and devise means of permitting alumni access without permitting them access to content that is currently restricted to enrolled students.
• Raise money for more access. In many cases, the simplest means of providing access for more people will be to pay more money. Depending on the database, it could be more feasible for the association to make regular donations to cover all alumni, or it could be more cost effective if individual alumni pay a reasonable fee for extra services. The key thing to keep in mind is that WMU Library is merely passing on the cost it takes on in adding more users. The money to pay for it has to come from somewhere.
• Create library consortiums. We recently put out the call for all libraries who maintain maritime collections and provide support to maritime researchers to join us in the creation of a Maritime Librarian's Association. We will step up our efforts to make this happen in 2013. Library consortiums can often get better deals through collective licensing of databases. It might be that there is a library nearby where you live or work that can join us, or there is a library already established in your place of work. Or perhaps we can help your place of business establish a library. Here again, WMU library needs guidance and support from the alumni to be of assistance.
• Broker with information vendors on behalf of institutions that alumni are affiliated with. In some cases, the only viable way to provide access to something desired by alumni is via a direct contract between the information vendor and the "end user" customer. WMU library staff can help broker deals with vendors who will not work with consortiums and will not permit remote access for alumni under a WMU license. If needed, we can help institutions set up their own "libraries" with standing in the library community to participate in Interlibrary Loans and document sharing programs, and to contract with database vendors on library terms, which are usually more favorable than terms offered to individual subscribers.

Conclusion

WMU Library service for alumni is better than nothing but less than desirable. To move forward requires help from the alumni themselves. Financial support and the setting of priorities are the two most critical steps to extending our library services to alumni.

We need also mention that there are highly desirable services we do not yet have, even for currently enrolled students, as they are services that do not yet exist. We believe WMU Library can work on creating these services -- for the benefit of the maritime community at large -- but we have no hope of success without the active support of our alumni and the network of maritime professionals with whom they are associated. That is a discussion The Maritime Librarian can save for its next installment, after graduation, should your interest as an alumni continue past the 2nd of December.

What's the deal with Lloyd's List online pricing?

A subscription to Lloyd's Online lists for  £1955 per person per year. For individual subscriptions for all WMU faculty, staff and currently enrolled students, that price would be an astronomical figure approaching half a million GBP. Fortunately, Lloyd's offers discounted institutional site licensing for thirty-five thousand pounds, a much better deal, to be sure, but still expensive. The last time I spoke with a Lloyd's representative on the phone, he was willing to extend access to all enrolled students for sixteen thousand pounds. That is as low as they are willing to go. Lloyd's believes what they sell is worth what they are asking, but it is still too costly for us to to provide simultaneous access to everyone on campus.

We get one online account for each of our three subscriptions to the Lloyd's print edition. Because we keep the print editions, three people can simultaneously access the same past issue from our archives. When one patron is finished reading, it is returned to the library and a fourth person can read it. In a year, the number of people who could read one of our three copies of that single issue of Lloyd's could theoretically be in the hundreds, or even thousands.

In the Lloyd's online, however, only the three librarians whose names are on the subscriptions can access that issue, or any other issue. Our position is that our patrons should have the same access electronically that they have in our print archives: Any three users in the university should simultaneously be able to access the same issue from the Lloyd's Online archive. If we purchase a fourth subscription, Lloyd's would be within its rights to limit us to three users for any issue that preceded the date of the additional subscription, but they should allow four users for any subsequent issues. And we should be offered this access at a reduced price, since the online edition requires no ink, no newsprint, and is transported over the internet.

If they are pricing online access based on the cost of the print infrastructure, publishers should at least extend the same level of access as we have with a print subscription. If "digital rights management" software is not yet that granular, it should be, and WMU is willing to join Lloyd's in the effort to develop it.

The Economics of Open Source

"This revolution has occurred so rapidly that many institutional managers above the level 
of day-to-day IT work are unaware of the low-cost -- often free -- options ripe for the taking."

As we have seen with the library's deployment of the Koha library management system, the free software movement has emerged beyond the wishful thinking of its early champions to become a viable competitor in numerous information technology endeavors.  Indeed, it is our contention that the economic trend does not favor traditional commercial software as the principal solution of organizational IT. This trend is not hard to understand in terms of consumer demand, where free solutions are preferable even when they are not as good as commercial alternatives, so long as they are good enough. But consumer demand in itself would not endanger the proprietary model were it not for the strong incentives among software developers, themselves, to give away their code.

To appreciate the incentives at work in current software development we must bear in mind the need for an enterprise to focus on its core business and outsource the rest on the most favorable terms. In the past, the proprietary, commercial code vendors saved their customers money by automating manual routines with off-the-shelf software that could be mass-produced far less expensively than could be accomplished with in-house programming. They also provided a certain peace of mind by offering a product that was standardized, at least among the customer base, which created an incentive for businesses to buy what every one else was buying, thus reinforcing the code proprietor's standard.

Eventually, the success of the shrink-wrapped software solution exposed its achilles heal, for the software company profiting from the sale of multiple iterations of its standard code found it increasingly challenging to accommodate the exceptions and local configurability demanded by customers with similar but not absolutely identical needs. Different institutional work flows, organizational structures, legal requirements and commercial relationships required linking applications and exchanging data in ways that no single software vendor could possibly anticipate, which forced institutions either to purchase customized code from the vendor (and hope the customization would still function after the next upgrade), lobby with company developers and the customer user group for enhancements in the next release (and hope the majority of customers supported the enhancements), or muddle along with the status quo (and give up hope of further automation in that particular realm). 

The challenge to this economic model came when wide-spread use of the internet allowed the sharing of code which was written not to be sold, but to solve particular problems in particular institutions. The code was posted and left "open" for all to use with the caveat YMMV --"your mileage may vary"-- in explicit recognition that local circumstances might necessitate adaptation on the part of the user. In time, the internet was host to vast libraries of open code contributed by thousands of programmers. Volunteer communities and standards bodies evolved which facilitated even greater sharing of solutions. In large sectors of the IT economy, programmer talent was lured from the profits of proprietary code sales to the rapid development and deployment environment offered by what came to be known as the Open Source movement. For network and server administrators struggling with tight budgets, the growth of mature applications that rivalled and even surpassed the reliability, scalability and integrability of commercial equivalents made the switch to Open  Source an increasingly attractive option. 

While chaos would seem to have been an inherent risk in this world-wide openness, the reality has been that the development community rapidly sorted winners from losers and built upon what was easiest to integrate with previous or ongoing developments. In this way, Open Source not only inspired innovation, but standardization, a benefit to IT maintenance equally as important as the significantly reduced price of software.  This revolution has occurred so rapidly that many institutional managers above the level of day-to-day IT work are unaware of the low-cost -- often free -- options ripe for the taking. 

Skeptics who hold to the adage that "you get what you pay for" assume that the developers of free software can not be trusted to continue development and provide support with only altruism as their incentive. In all likelihood, past experience with haphazard, undocumented solutions written by in-house programmers no longer available to provide support have further prejudiced them against any software not written by one of the major commercial vendors. Such skeptics are wrong to confuse the home-grown development model, which the proprietary model largely replaced, with the Open Source community model which is now gaining ascendance. The skeptics are equally wrong in assuming there is no profit motive in Open Source development.

The profit, however, is not achieved in the sale of software, but in the savings realized through collaborative development. Again, we refer to the business imperative of concentrating on the unique product --on what economists call business "differentiation"-- rather than expending time and effort developing in-house solutions to problems that are not unique. Open Source software development is no exception. As computer scientist Bruce Perens has written in "The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source" (16 Feb 2005):

It is funded directly or indirectly as a cost-center item by the companies that need it. Those companies need a great deal of cost-center, non-differentiating software. They are willing to invest in its creation through the Open Source paradigm because it allows them to spend less on their cost centers by distributing the cost and risk among many collaborators, and makes more efficient use of their software dollar than the retail paradigm.

This "retail paradigm" is the prism which too often distorts the managerial view of software acquisition. Word processors, spreadsheet programs, image manipulators, even database applications and web servers, tend to be evaluated as end-user commodities, to be paid for and consumed in the same manner as electronic books or music in digital format. But with the exception of the vendors who profit by the retail model, there is no reason for anyone else to think of such programs as "end use" consumables instead of as tools that help them in their work, as means to an end. Users would ordinarily choose free software if they were not under the impression that the programs they pay for are going to be better supported and have a rapid release of useful new features. After all, at least some of the money that they pay is expected to go back into product maintenance and development.

But unlike physically-tangible goods, software, once created, can be replicated infinitely with no further production cost, and can be distributed at almost no cost over the internet. Under the retail paradigm, the price of software is essentially arbitrary once production costs have been recouped. In the Open Source paradigm, developers are not losing profits by forgoing sales. In the first place, the expense of writing code is not viewed as an investment for which a return must be justified, but as the cost of solving problems pursuant to the institution's main business. In the second place, there is an entire community of developers in other institutions willing and ready to extend the code's functionality and adapt it to more uses than its originators could have envisioned. In the words of Network World's Stephen Walli, "The value gained by each contributor is enormous when compared to the cost of contributing." ("Open source: nobody is working for free," 2 Sept. 2010).

And here is why the long-term economic trend is working against the proprietary code model: Developing in corporate isolation, or collaborating through subcontracted, non-disclosure arrangements, the goal of the for-profit code writer is differentiation in a market where differentiation adds little or no value, and can in fact be a liability. Customers will not particularly care about bells and whistles if the basic functionality that helps them in their work can be had for free. The open source alternative not only suffices, but the open source community will respond more quickly and more accurately when the market requires innovation and variation, because of the commonly held asset of open code which can be instantly leveraged by thousands of programmers for thousands of different purposes. In that community even novice developers can search the internet for serviceable solutions that require only a little modification of the source code, which they are of course free to do. Professional developers can team up with developers in other businesses, libraries, science labs, etc., to share the burden of creating applications of mutual benefit, and their efforts only have to start where the ever expanding repositories of open source leave off. Their contribution to those repositories will make some one else's development efforts easier in the future.

The proprietary software vendors, on the other hand, can not as effectively leverage this vast savings in development effort. They can take advantage of open code written by others, but as their motive is proprietary differentiation, they do not share the part of their code that is unique, and therefore can not benefit from the advice of the larger development community. It is, in effect, above criticism. Open Source software, on the other hand, is essentially peer-reviewed software. Any bug or security hole gets noticed and reported immediately in public forums, and workaround tips are quickly disseminated. By contrast, vendors have every incentive to stay mum, hope any bugs go unnoticed, and slip in the fix in the next release. Whereas commercial software brought much-needed improvements over the home-grown systems and manual office work of the past, in this day of ultra cheap storage and virtually free internet transport, the closely-guarded code of the proprietary model would be an obstacle to greater efficiencies and greater economies of scale, were it not for the fact that the community is free to share its own solutions, regardless of what commercial software companies want to keep hidden.

It must be mentioned that Open Source has not obsolesced commercial incentives in IT work. "Pioneer" enterprises have a marketable niche at least until an Open Source technologist manages to replicate or improve on the technology. OpenOffice, for example, offers word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database software every bit as sophisticated in functionality as Microsoft's, and can be used free of charge, while developers can extend their own functionality. When OpenOffice became the property of Oracle, the open source community responded with a virtual clone in LibreOffice. In other cases, vendors offer a robust open source version, available for free and continually improved through community development, but charge for an "Enterprise edition" with proprietary extensions and service guarantees; its core, however, is still based on the evolving work of the Open Source community. 

And there are companies which charge a fee to host, administer, and even develop extensions to open source applications. WMU library has employed the London-based PTFS company to host its Koha library management system until it can be maintained by in-house staff on a cloud-based sever. In that hosting arrangement, any development PTFS might do for hire on WMU's behalf would be made available to the Koha community. By the same measure, any useful developments by other institutions are likewise available at no cost to WMU. Furthermore, PTSF's client, i.e., the WMU librarians, have complete "root user access" to make their own developments. And lastly, when the library decides not to host any longer with PTFS, the company will surrender the Koha source code and the WMU data. This is now a typical arrangement between small institutions without the means for supporting Open Source software, and IT companies which can provide that support cheaply by not having to pass on proprietary license fees.


While we predict growth in the commercial business of supporting Open Source development, we are not predicting the extinction of proprietary software itself. We are only pointing out that its economically viability is, or should be be, limited to areas where differentiation is an advantage. As the Google Apps Marketplace demonstrates, cloud-based hybrids that offer software as a service are finding the means to add their specialized additions to the great core of common code, but can do so more cheaply than they could develop software as a proprietary commodity. This should strike a chord with businesses that would rather pay only for the distinct functionality they need than for the bloatware of additional features which the retail developer includes to justify higher development costs.

In terms of what software is worth paying for, and for how much, it is up to every organization to understand the  economic implications within the context of its core business. Alas, there is no substitute for institutional diligence on matters regarding Information Technology. There is no comprehensive solution, nor will there likely ever be one, with proprietary code or with Open Source. The institutional variations are too great for any one vendor, any group of programmers, to make a one-size-fits-all application, particularly when the pace of technological change continues to accelerate. Thus, while comprehensiveness of functionality might seem critical in evaluating software solutions, it is not in the long-term more important than conformance to data standards and exchange protocols. The ability to "play well with others" is a criteria institutions ignore at their peril. All the more important, then, to adopt applications which expose their source code to the review and scrutiny of the community. 

Our Do-It-Yourself Book Scanner Project

The picture below is a proper rendering of the Do-It-Yourself (diy) book scanner that we attempted to make earlier in the year. The blueprints for the frame are downloadable as computer instructions that can be fed into a “CNC” router, which laser cuts all the pieces from a single board into an IKEA-like assembly kit.

Do-it-yourself (DIY) books scanner. Instructions and supply 

list can be downloaded for free from they diy community

web site.

The basic scanning process on the homegrown scanner that we have now works adequately enough. Two mounted cameras allow us to take a series of left and right photos simultaneously with the click of a touchpad mouse. Software is used to join all the pages into a single file, read the text through the OCR process, and save the results as a PDF. But while the contraption we use now proves that the concept will work, the mechanical piece for turning and holding down the pages does not function as well as needed for the sustained scanning operations we intend. The structure suffers from us not having had access to the right equipment to build it.

Fitz -- who had the original idea and built our first version scanner -- has been searching all over Northern Europe for a a business that does CNC routing on demand. As of this writing, the only company he has found is in Latvia. The good news is that they not only have the equipment, but they are affiliated with the DIY community which maintains the design. They already have the plans plugged into their routers and are selling the kit at an introductory rate of €438.42, with free shipping. This does not include cameras, computer, or software, but we already have those, and we know they work. We just need a more stable framework, or as they call it in the community, a “basekit.”

CNC Router

We hope some day that Copenhagen or even Malmö will have the CNC routers we need, as we are thinking we might one day distribute book scanners at cost or a small profit to maritime agencies in developing nations, with the goal of getting our hands on their content before the big publishing interests do. Proximity and bulk orders should help bring down the cost even more, which is already pretty cheap compared to the so-called real book scanners on the market. The fancy commercial scanners with automatic page turning can cost upwards of €40 thousand.

But for now, we just need one good basekit. I have several students interested in helping us scan, and several collections and numerous older books that we won’t have to move to the new building if we can get them digitized. But the news for today is that the purchase order has been approved, and we hope to get our kit sometime this month.

Stay tuned. We'll probably post a video of it in action once we get it assembled.

WMU Library 1.9

The WMU library staff have been busy purchasing, installing, configuring, downloading, uploading, programming and updating all across the spectrum of our collections and services. In addition to several new databases, we have implemented a proxy server to allow access to our online resources from off campus -- in fact, from anywhere with an internet connection, an OpenURL resolver which will greatly facilitate direct access at the article level from various search engines, including Google Scholar, an A-Z list of our available electronic journals, an online course reserves or "short loan" system, a digital repository to replace the aging "Maritime PDF" database, and a new web site that is fully integrated into the university's web environment.

I call the sum of these innovations the WMU Library 1.9, not that they aren't ready for production release, but because 2.0 has such a ring of finality and certitude, and we intend to keep refining, improving, and as often as necessary, overhauling our collections and services in support of the WMU curriculum and maritime research.

New databases

OECD Transport Library. After getting several reference questions the answers to which required purchases from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's online collections, we decided to subscribe to the OECD iLibray. Actually, we got the subset known as the Transport Library. This includes approximately 500 books, year books, conference papers and individual chapters in the Portable Document Format (PDF), with more content being added each month. This collection can be searched online at the iLibrary web site and PDF's can be downloaded by anyone in the WMU community. The purchase was made in early 2012, and we are about to renew the subscription. To make the OECD content more easy to discover, we recently downloaded the Transport catalog records from the OECD web site, and will be including them in our local catalog, with links directly from the catalog record to the full text.

Clarkson's Shipping Intelligence Network. We have had several students and visiting professors asking for various reports and statistical information by Clarkson's, so we were leaning towards a subscription already when we heard from the incoming professor of ship finance and risk management that Clarkson's was essential to his research and to the assignments he would be giving his students. Clarkson's, which charges premium prices for premium information, was very generous in its academic discount, and as a result, our students now have access to a searchable ship registry of over 42,000 existing vessels and nearly 10,600 ships on order, with searchable data on owners, builders, flags, fleets, fixtures, and sales, in addition to market reports on more than 20 sectors, time series and graphs generation, and full text access to Clarkson Shipping Intelligence weekly and monthly reports. If I were planning on being a shipping magnate, I would have an office subscription to this database -- which reminds me: Use of the WMU subscription to Clarkson's is for Academic purposes only. The WMU MSc curriculum provides an education in how to use it, but if you want to make money with it, get your own license. 

Guide to Shipping Registers. This database from Marine Money includes details of Flag State requirements for vessel registration, list of IMO Conventions ratified, registration fees, etc. Much of this information used to be provided in print format as the Lloyd's Guide to Ship Registries and Ship Management Services, but frankly, the lack of searchable, sortable, categorized content, does not make this site more useful than a printed version. The interface is just a drill down map of the world that leads to one or more documents about the flag state, often a series of simple pages in Google Sites, but many times a PDF, offering registration information of varying currency in no consistent order. A vessel owner looking to register would have to browse state by state and take notes, just as with a printed book. Still, a maritime library needs to provide its patrons with access to this information, and for the time being, this is the best we've found. With enough participation from our world-wide patronage, however, this is exactly the kind of information that could be crowd-sourced for free, with a much more useful interface. The data hosting costs would be minimal, perhaps sufficiently paid for with clickable web ads, or perhaps even by a small contribution from the flag states themselves. This purchase was made in pursuant to research needs of Prof. Murkejee and PhD student Jian Zhao. The print publications by Lloyd's Ship Management that was on the library shelves was far out of date.

HeinOnline Core International Collection. More than 1,600 law and law-related periodicals from inception; the world's largest collection of constitutions and constitutional documents; One hundred thousand of the most important early English cases that laid the foundation for the laws of nations under the British Empire; The United Nations Law Collection, Foreign & International Law Resources Database, as well as Legal Classics. This new acquisition will be particularly useful to students and professors of Maritime Law and the Law of the Sea. We are grateful to Hein for a very steep discount on our subscription price. Many thanks to Professor Chie Kojima for patiently enduring our failure to get HeinOnline when she first mentioned it nearly two years ago.

Science Direct Deposit Account. The journal titles in Science Direct are expensive, but some of the articles in them are highly desirable to our patrons. We simply could not afford to subscribe to every title that might be of use, but we also did not want WMU library users to miss out on content that is of use. Through the Elseviere/Science Direct deposit account system, the library has prepaid for a bundle of articles. Our users can find articles in any of the Science Direct publications, and submit a request for it through the library. Staff will mediate the order, which will be deducted from the deposit account. This way, library users can search the entire database, but the library only pays for individual articles rather than for yearly journal subscriptions. Although access to the requested material is not immediate, the library staff will in most cases obtain the article on the same day, or at the latest, on the next business day.

Proxy server

As in the case of most of our databases, WMU has a "site license" which enables all our students and faculty simultaneous access based on their location. If they are within the "IP range" of WMU, on the ethernet or wireless, they are automatically allowed into these third party resources. But students who live off campus, or professors on travel, etc., are unable to access these resources that the library has paid for them to use. To address this problem, the library purchased EzProxy, a software service that allows WMU members who are not physically on campus to appear to third parties as if they were coming from within the WMU domain. The links to databases on the WMU web pages are set up to route users through the proxy server. If they are within the university domain, they go straight to the resource. If not, they are asked to authenticate with their WMU Gmail login and password. If they are already logged into their WMU Google Apps account, the proxy service will accept and route them to the desired resource. For sites that require a username and password, EzProxy can be configured by library staff to provide institutional login credentials behind the scenes, so that this information does not need to be shared. 

With EzProxy, the library's subscription-based content can be made available to all our users wherever they are, but if the user is not first proven to be a member of WMU, or an on campus visitor, that content can not be accessed. EzProxy is sold by OCLC as subscription software and is hosted on an in-house WMU server.

OpenURL resolver

Leased more for development purposes than for immediate deployment, the 360 Link subscription service by Serials Solutions enables third party systems to retrieve links to electronic articles, books, chapters and conference papers without having to know the actual web address of those items. By encoding reasonably accurate and correctly formatted citation information in the web address (known as the Uniform Resource Locator, or URL), third parties have their requests checked against a knowledge base configured to know what journals, databases and ebook subscriptions a library has access to. Knowledge base companies work with database companies and know which database packages their library customers subscribe to. As a middleware service, 360 Link checks an incoming request against its knowledge base, processing the bibliographic data encoded in the URL and resolving it as a link to the full text document if the requesting party is authorized to view the content. This becomes particularly useful in federated searching across multiple databases maintained by a variety of publishers and information aggregators, or when building a common index of bibliographic data harvested from multiple databases.

Most of the major players in academic publishing have contributed their bibliographic data to one or more knowledge bases already, so that subscribers to a particular knowledge base, typically libraries, need only tell the Resolver which databases they subscribe to in order to provide links to all the journal titles in those databases, and all the full text articles available in those journals. When search results are returned via the Resolver service, if two or more databases contain the requested article, all links will be shown. If one of the databases offers the journal title, but not the particular issue or date of publication being requested, a link to that database will not appear in the search results. If none of the resources return full-text links, a link to the library's catalog can be returned. Libraries typically do not index at the article level, but resolvers can be configured to check to see if the title is available in the print collection, and if the particular issue needed is owned by the library. The resolver can also link to an interlibrary loans or article purchase request form, automatically filling in the bibliographic portion from the search terms in the URL.

With implementation of the Resolver, much of the content residing behind the paywalls of WMU subscriptions can now be directly accessed from Google Scholar. A Scholar user within the WMU IP range or using the WMU proxy server would be known to Google as a WMU patron. Since the library Staff have registered the university's Serial's Solutions 360 Link connecting information with Google Scholar, Google will route search results through WMU's Resolver. As it normally would, Google will return links to documents that match the search criterial, but it will also provide direct links to full text content from any of the information resources that the library has registered with the knowledge base service. Thus, journal articles available through the library's subscriptions to ProQuest, Ebrary, Cambridge, Springer, etc, can be directly accessed from Google Scholar search results.

As with Google Scholar, anything we might buy, lease, or develop, in pursuit of unifying search results from disparate resources, will be reliant on a vast knowledge base of URLs. A community-maintained knowledge base of comparable accuracy and comprehensiveness as those now available commercially is yet to be realized. Free, OpenSource Resolver software that manages and configures these knowledge bases is available, but knowledge base vendors already bundle their own OpenURL Resolver with the purchase. We shall continue to explore options and lobby for a free knowledge base of URL's contributed freely by professionals and academics in the maritime community, but for now, we have access to a very comprehensive repository of links to the content we pay for, which will facilitate user access to that content, from wherever they happened to discover it.

A-Z journal list

Serials Solutions offers an alphabetical list of the electronic journals we have access to through our subscriptions packages with various databases. This list is comprised of approximately twenty thousand titles. Serials Solutions also lists many of the ebook titles we own or lease, which is close to eighty thousand. One never knows in what journal, or in what academic discipline, an article might turn up that will be useful to the maritime researcher, so the WMU library user is free to browse the whole A-Z title list, or search it for journals or book. However, among the scores of thousands of titles available, some will have a higher percentage of relevant content than others. The library has therefore set up a system to routinely search the entire list by key words in title and present a more manageable A-Z list of journals likely to have a higher proportion of maritime-related content. The list is comprised of approximately 150 e-journals. Coverage dates are included, as are links to the journal. Users authenticated with their WMU Google Apps account can browse select a title, browse through the volumes and issues, and access any individual articles that is covered in the library's subscription to that journal. The A-Z list also provides a search form for each journal, allowing users to search for specific articles within the journal. The Full, as well as the Selected, A-Z list of journals can be found on the library home page under the E-journals link.

Course readings & electronic reserves

The library has launched a web site to make available articles, book chapters, conference papers and documents that are required reading for WMU classes. Course instructors can specify content they want on "Electronic Reserves," and the library will either track down a digital copy, or scan one from the print collections. Digital reproductions are limited to copyright and the right of fair use for academic purposes. Students can go to the Readings web site, and select the appropriate course link. In some cases, a link is provided to an online resource elsewhere, such as Ebrary, ProQuest, or IMO. In others, a PDF will be provided. For reasons of copyright compliance, not all content is downloadable, and will therefore have to be read online. But it must be borne in mind that this system is less costly than providing individual print copies to each student, and it is far more flexible and more easily updated than the traditional system of ordering print copies, waiting (hoping) for their arrival, receiving and in-processing them, and signing them over to individual students. Thanks to Ms. Anna Volkova of the library staff for her initiative and persistence in making online reserves a reality.

Replacing the "Maritime PDF" database with The Beacon

The library will be replacing the database known as "Maritime PDF" with "The Beacon," a search and retrieval tool built by our own Chris Fitzpatrick. The Beacon's technologies are newer, the interface more user friendly, and the application more scalable and adaptable for our future needs.

That said, the Maritime PDF database was in such horrible shape -- about equal portions of valuable and worthless content mixed together, with no useable "metadata" for author, subjects, publication information, etc. -- that on our first launch the Beacon will contain only the dissertations that we have in electronic format. That is the approximately 400 dissertations that have been stored electronically since 1999 -- out of a total 8 thousand items currently in the Maritime PDF.

We are not throwing away any content from the Maritime PDF collection, but we do not want to add anything to the Beacon that we have not first identified as worthy of storage, and second, that we have not properly cataloged. Proper cataloging allows users to filter, sort and browse in a way that can not be done in a database that only offers keyword searching. It also allows users to export records into bibliographic reference tools such as Endnote, Refworks, Mendelay, etc.

Faculty members who know of specific content in the Maritime PDF that should be retained are advised to let the library know. We will extract it and place it in the queue for cataloging and addition to the Beacon. Meanwhile, the library will shortly begin a scanning project to add the WMU dissertations written prior to 1999 (more than 1200).

The tentative date for taking down the Maritime PDF is 1 Nov 2012. If you would like a sneak peak at the beacon, check out http://beacon.wmu.se

New library web site

The library has been limping along for quite some time using the catalog as its home page. Although not optimized for it, the system which allows searching and circulation of our print inventory has had web pages added to it explaining library policies and opening hours, listing our databases and journal holdings, and posting library news and announcements. But as of 19 October, 2012, we now have a real web site that is more attractive, easier to navigate, and much more easier to update and maintain. It holds the Selected A-Z journal list, provides library news and new book announcements, links directly to our popular online subscription content, and will shortly provide forms for interlibrary loans and purchase requests. But this is just the beginning. We will be making many more additions in the future, so stay tuned. As usual with all things web at WMU, a special thanks to Erik Ponnert for his insights and assistance in getting the site configured and launched.

Copyright and the library

Background

No library plan is sufficient that does not give consideration to the thickening tangle of legal and financial issues surrounding copyright in the digital age. Originally intended in the early 17th Century to protect authors from unauthorized reproduction of their works by unscrupulous booksellers and printers, copyright has evolved primarily to protect the intellectual property interests of publishers, to the point that authors have to take care not to infringe the copyright of their own work.  Before the convenience of electronic storage, internet distribution, and print-on-demand technologies, publishers had to layout considerable fixed costs per publication, having to estimate the size of their press run to amortize those costs over the number of items printed. A large press run lowered the cost per item, but overestimating the market for a publication wasted assets and filled warehouses with unwanted inventory. Because of the risks assumed by the publishing houses in bringing a work to print, authors typically surrendered ownership of their works in return for publishing with a reputable press. Financial remuneration was sometimes possible, but in the case of scholarly works, the chief reward was, and continues to be, the prestige. The presses which conducted “peer review” -- selecting subject experts as referees to determine a work’s suitability for publication-- offered better recognition, and therefore have been the most sought after by scholars and researchers.

The copyright regime in place today is largely designed to accommodate this arrangement whereby the creators of scholarly work or producers of research sign over their copyrights to publishing enterprises that bear the cost of printing and distribution. But as the new technologies for storing and retrieving information have greatly reduced the cost and the risk, the chief justification for signing over copyrights is the “prestige factor” of having one’s work exhibited through a big name publisher. But this prestige comes at a cost which many researchers --and librarians--  find increasingly objectionable. After all, the research is not usually commissioned by the publisher, but subsidized by the research institution. Likewise, the publisher pays little, if anything, for the editorial and peer-review work, as such services are performed by peers for small stipends, or simply for the scholarly renown. And yet, as publishers assume but a fraction of the intellectual labor costs, and as technology has significantly lowered the costs of disseminating information, the price of mainstream publications has continued to rise for decades --in the case of journals, precipitously.

Libraries supporting research are therefore hostage to pricing schemes which reflect the overhead expenses of copyright-protected monopolies maintaining legacy print infrastructures, but which bear little relationship to the value added by the publishers. Libraries have responded across academia with the only option available to them, cutting acquisitions. Ironically, research materials are being priced out of the reach of the researcher by the researcher’s own adherence to the status quo of peer-review.

The struggle is now on to redefine ownership of intellectual property in the “information age.” In the mean time, the WMU Library must continue to meet the research needs of its patrons --doing so within its means and without antagonizing the traditional publishing interests holding copyright on needed research materials. Neither the library staff nor the legal researchers on the WMU faculty have expertise in the area of copyright law, a situation made even more difficult by the ambiguous status of an international university situated in Sweden but with a collection of printed works and electronic databases owned mostly by non-Swedish publishers. As the WMU Library grows in its collections and extends its international patronage, this situation needs to be redressed. It will be the librarian’s responsibility to develop a set of flexible policies that can protect the university from litigation in state regimes, and to get clarification from IMO and the UN on “international copyright.” The WMU library will meanwhile proceed in developing and sharing its collections according to the best practices available, adopting a liberal but defensible “Fair Use” policy, establishing --with representatives of the publishing industry and through in-house technologies-- an equitable system of “digital rights management,” and promoting Open Access journals and repositories as viable alternatives to traditional venues of publication.

Fair Use

The university currently pays an annual license fee of about SEK 150 per full-time student (set to increase to SEK 200) to Bonus Presskopia, the Swedish Reproduction Rights Organization. This modest fee is intended as protection against possible publishers’ suits for violation of copyright. In return for this payment, WMU faculty members are allowed to copy up to “15 percent of the pages in the publication, but not more than 15 pages, in the same academic year and on behalf of the same students“, which roughly corresponds with the copying rights granted to individuals by the Swedish Copyright Law. Elsewhere the university posts the rules as permitting 5% of a given work, or one article from a journal issue, or one book chapter, to be copied for personal use for scholarly or research purposes only. But whether or not non-Swedish publishers accept the legitimacy of the university’s “fair use” payments in accordance with Swedish Law, which recognizes “Kopimism” as a religion, the question for the library is its role in facilitating legitimate “personal” and “scholarly” use.
Library patrons have ready access to copiers and scanners, not to mention smart phones with digital cameras. In the face of this reality, WMU does not have the means to police the percentages of works copied per user or the sharing among users of privately copied materials. Library staff will ensure patrons know the rules, and will enforce those rules in the face of flagrant and open violations. Additionally, in its capacity as custodian of course reserves materials, the library will work with faculty to build and maintain curriculum-based reading collections that pass the “educational purposes” clause of typical copyright law, limiting access to members of the class, and only for the duration of the class. The university should meanwhile continue to pay copyright clearance fees until it is determined that they are not legally required or do not cover the materials being copied. Materials obtained digitally though Interlibrary Loans or commercial document services will be delivered with the appropriate copyright compliance notice.

Digital Rights Management

Copyright-compliant access to commercial digital materials is increasingly being handled by the vendors themselves. Journal aggregators provide access to particular titles to library users based on subscription arrangements. Providers of “e-book” services, such as Ebrary, Coutts, Dawson and other book vendors have their own built-in software controls to limit the number of simultaneous readers according to “copies” purchased. Other vendors are using Adobe’s “Digital Editions” for the same purpose. But not all DRM systems are equal. Cancelling an agreement with a vendor could mean cancelling access to books and articles that have been paid for, and prices and number of simultaneous users can vary by provider.

WMU intends to increase its use of these e-content services significantly, particularly in support of the academic curriculum, but also for research collections where appropriate. The Librarian and Assistant Librarian for Bibliographic Services will have joint responsibility for determining the best subscription packages and individual title purchases according to collection needs and library resources.

There are still many online sources of maritime information that do not have DRM systems implemented. In many cases, the library purchases subscription access to premium content web sites, online journals, and databases intended for a single user. As site-licensed access for universities and libraries is generally not offered, getting access for more users means purchasing more accounts. In the case of e-books, the library also pays for individual chapters and monographs it downloads on behalf of patrons, from sources (such as the IMO) that do not necessarily accommodate transference from the purchaser (library) to third parties (requesting patrons).

It is the library’s position that, should an appropriate DRM mechanism be devised locally or in collaboration with the library community, it would be within the library’s rights to keep and distribute purchased content according to its usage rights at the time of purchase. For example, if the library were to cache Lloyd’s List in a daily archive, it should in theory be allowed to provide online access to three users simultaneously per daily issue in its archive, just as it could do with its archive of printed daily issues, because the library has purchased three subscriptions to Lloyd’ List. Lloyd’s and other vendors might of course disagree with the library’s claims to electronic access, and no locally-managed DRM system is currently available with such a degree of functionality, but it is important to state the principle as a working premise in the library’s acquisition of commercial digital content.

For the foreseeable future, Digital Rights Management of commercially provided electronic content will be an important part of library collections and services. But of growing importance is a movement among universities and research institutes that has the potential to make DRM a moot point. At the very least, the Open Access movement is revolutionizing rights in favor of the researcher.

Open Access

As previously observed, the producers of research and creators of scholarly articles and monographs rarely receive direct financial rewards for their publishing activities. But they are still inspired to have their work reach the widest possible audience. The conventional publishing houses, while reaching the audiences that can afford them, are otherwise an obstacle to the broadest possible dissemination of information. Open Access publications, by contrast, do not charge readers for access. Like most traditional scholarly presses, Open Access publishers also do not pay scientists and authors for their work. In fact, in many cases they require payment from the author, or the author’s research funding agency. But this should not be confused with “vanity publishing.” Open Access offers peer-review, and work does not get published simply because the author can fund the publication.

As unsettling as it might be for those accustomed to the traditional publishing regime, when authors fund their own publications in this way it reduces the net cost of bringing the information to the public. The creator makes a one-time payment for the cost of publishing, paying only the actual cost, but access to the published work is then free to the world.

The WMU library will seek out quality Open Access periodicals and endeavor to incorporate them into its collections and indexes. At present, there are only a handful of specifically maritime journals available as Open Access, although conventional publishers, perhaps seeing the handwriting on the wall, are starting to offer sample articles as Open Access for maritime titles that otherwise require proprietary access.

The library staff is also willing and ready to work with faculty on finding reputable Open Access journals in which to make their research and editorial contributions. In time, the library should be positioned to host Open Access journals on the library infrastructure.

Information Piracy? How about the Pirates in Publishing?

We're all aware of the publisher's lament about piracy of copyrighted information. But as I sit here looking at an invoice for a standing order, billing us more each year for slimmer and slimmer volumes, I have to wonder who the real pirates are: Ninety pages for £245. That's awful enough, but it's actually much worse than that. The latter 53 pages consist of the sort of who's who directory information that would be more complete, more up-to-date and easier to use if it was online. Any social networking link would serve us better -- for free. So excluding the directory information -- and really, how much work was it to paste in the email replies with change of POC information into last year's word processing document? -- the actual "content" is an anemic 37 pages. That's £6.62 per page.

In this particular publication, the articles were well-written but not scholarly, authored by industry experts and pundits. So the cost of this publication could certainly not be justified as cost recovery of research expenditures. Timewise, they were worth the read, but how much of this £6.62 per page were the authors getting? My geuss is none. As is often the case, they are paid merely in the recognition they get for publishing with a prestigous trade publication. But at $6.62 per page, how prestigous can it actually be when nobody can afford to read it?

At these prices, you have to be selective, and even good content that gets used is under scrutiny for the axe. I recently denied a graduate student's request to update an annual report that, because of cost, we only buy once every two years. Just to show her why that was our policy, I looked up the latest edition with her. After she got over the sticker shock, she decided she would look elsewhere for the information. The publication in question cost more than €500 for a flimsy 50 page report -- over €10 per page. In this case, the publisher -- among the most "reputable" in the business --appears to have had little to do but take in the numbers submitted by various players in the industry, align them in a spreadsheet, run the sheet through a page layout program, and viola, that will be five hundred Euros, please. The only serious effort on their part was this year's cover design (although even this was probably outsourced).

The data for 2011 did not actually come to market until April, and likely didn't reach library shelves until May or June, meaning by the time that libraries can boast of it on the new books list, the information is already out of date. Obviously, this sort of information would be easier to maintain online. If it is not dynamically updated throughout the year, at least the static e-print version should be available sooner. And considering that the value added to the content by the publisher is practically nil, the price should naturally be far cheaper, since the "friction costs" of printing, warehousing and shipping are non-existent.

Not so. In most cases, the price is the same, or even higher, as users are expected to pay for the convenience of online access. As often as not, the deal offered is: Buy the online edition, get the print copy free -- or vice-versa.

So if the author's aren't paid, or paid much, if the publishers add little if any value to the submitted information, if the online version bears negligible friction costs, and is basically as stale as the print publication, exactly why does the industry agree to buy its own information back at such extortionate prices?

IMO vessel registration numbers: A short history

According the IHS Fairplay web site:

The IMO Registered Owner and Company Numbers are the result of past and ongoing data collection, data research and database activities of IHS Fairplay. The intellectual property rights in the Numbers belong to IHS Fairplay. Other than the IMO or Flag Administrations, it is not permitted to use these Numbers in any commercial database, commercial web-site or commercial data product, nor to distribute the Numbers for commercial gain, without the prior written agreement of IHS Fairplay.¹

Most of the “past” data collection that resulted in this intellectual property claim began much earlier than 2008, when IHS acquired minimal working majority rights over Lloyd’s Register --Fairplay.² The collection of IHS’ maritime data originated in the late 18th century, when the London sea merchant interests and shipowners who met regularly in Edward Lloyd’s coffee house formed the Register Society in 1760. Four years later, the society published the first Register of Ships, which has been published annually since 1775. In 1834, the society was reorganized as Lloyd’s Register of British and Foreign Shipping. Since the 1870’s the Register has tried to include all self-propelled, sea-going vessels over 100 GT.³

While Lloyd’s collected details on ships and owners,⁴ Thomas Hope Robinson founded Fairplay Publications, Ltd. In the 1883 inaugural issue of the preeminent magazine of the shipping trade, Fairplay International, Robinson famously wrote, "There is so little Fairplay in the world. If our own efforts succeed, we shall have taken the first steps towards promoting the habit of calling things by their right name and looking at them through uncoloured spectacles" -- a testament to the need for plain dealing and open records in maritime transactions. The quote has appeared on the Fairplay masthead ever since. The magazine was later acquired by John Prime of the Financial Times.⁵

Both Lloyd’s and Fairplay produced numerous other publications deemed critical to the maritime profession, and, in the late 20th century, entered the world of database publishing. In 2001, these two potentates of maritime information --Lloyd’s Register’s Maritime Information Publishing Group and Fairplay Publications, Ltd. (still a subsidiary of Prime)-- were merged to form the joint venture company, Lloyd’s Register -Fairplay.⁶

Included in the merger was the Lloyd’s Register of Ships. Over its many years collecting information on hull sizes, carrying capacity, classification surveys, modifications, vessel sales and vessel owners, Lloyd’s had by 1963 conceived a scheme to record every past registered vessel with a unique six-digit number between 500001-539966, and to continue recording future registrations with numbers 54XXXX or greater. The numbering system changed in 1964, when the first two digits of the Lloyd’s Number were replaced with the last two digits of the year of build (or, in the discovery of older vessels without a known date of build, the last two digits of the year of discovery). By 1973, LR numbers were assigned at the time of contract between builder and owner, rather than upon completion of build, so that the first two digits reflected the year of contract. The 1969-1970 registry was published showing a check digit, making the LLoyd’s number seven digits from then on. Lloyd’s anticipated and headed off the millennium crisis in 1991 by abandoning any system based on year of contract, build or discovery and instead resorting to straight sequential numbering.⁷

This numbering system became the de facto standard in the industry. Even if vessels already had flag registration numbers or the numbers of other class registrations, the addition of the “Lloyd’s number” provided the benefit of being assigned for the life of the ship, notwithstanding changes of ownership or flag.⁸ Indeed, as the Register expanded, it included the “official number” supplied by the flag state as well as additional details that could be used for cross-referencing information from other agencies and companies.⁹

IMO took advantage of this comprehensiveness when it passed Resolution A.600(15), enacting the “IMO Ship Identification Numbering Scheme” in 1987 as a measure aimed at enhancing "maritime safety, and pollution prevention and to facilitate the prevention of maritime fraud". Under the terms of the resolution, the IMO number would consist of the Lloyd’s number, prefixed by the letters “IMO.” From the outset, Lloyd’s Register was acknowledged as IMO’s official registrar, and parties seeking to obtain IMO numbers for their vessels were directed to Lloyd’s Register. The resolution stated that there would be no cost to apply for an IMO number, and that the Register’s reference service would answer ad hoc questions about existing ships free of charge “up to a reasonable point of acceptability.”

Nevertheless, the Register’s commercial rights were acknowledged from the beginning. The resolution indicated that IMO numbers and related ship information could be obtained through the annually published register, the weekly updates, or the “Seadata” database, all of which were for sale through Lloyd’s, and that pricing for such information would need to be obtained from Lloyd’s Register of Shipping. It was parenthetically noted that IMO was granted access to Seadata.¹⁰

Voluntary at first, after the 1994 passage of SOLAS Regulation XI/3 it became mandatory to include the IMO number in the ship’s on board documentation,¹¹ In 2011 the IMO announced that SOLAS-compliant vessels would need to display the IMO number on the hull of the vessel. That the enhancement to safety justifies the additional cost of painting, embossing or otherwise putting seven digits on a ship’s hull has been disputed by organizations in the industry.¹²

A fact not to be disputed, however, is that when not attached to the Register’s vessel and owner information, the IMO number has no practical value. Linking the IMO number to ship data has always been predicated on a favored relationship with a company that had been collecting and organizing ship information for over two centuries. The numbering scheme itself was conceived by that company more than twenty years before Resolution A.600(15) proposed the assignment of IMO numbers, and the IMO number itself was no more than the company’s traditional number preceded by the letters “IMO.”

Without inquiring into private corporate details, it is difficult to estimate what profits accrued to the Register specifically because of its relationship with the IMO. Lloyd’s was in the business of selling its ship and owner information to begin with, and the universal number that marked a ship from contract to scrap was a Lloyd’s innovation predating the IMO’s intent to supply such a number for SOLAS purposes. The IMO has had gratis access to the registry data, and vessel registration has been free, as have been “reasonable” private inquiries of vessel IMO numbers. Since 1999, the IMO number has been freely searchable online through Equasis, a maritime database built from a community of port state control regimes, classification societies, P&I Clubs, and other “quality-minded maritime administrations,” including the Register.¹³

On the other hand, the costs for ship and shipping information, with or without the IMO number, can be considerable. A print publication of the 2012-2013 edition of the Register of Ships, now four volumes, lists at  £1595.00. Single user access to the online version of Sea-web, a successor to Seadata, lists for £1995, despite saving the publisher the cost of printing, binding and shipping.¹⁴

This rising price of maritime information coincides with the rising cost of commercially published information generally. The 2001 merger that resulted in Lloyd’s Register --Fairplay typified the consolidation of publishing interests that has rarely resulted in reduced costs to the reader. But ownership of the Register still rested with a merger of two enterprises rooted in the maritime community. In December 2008, IHS, a data service that employs more than 5,500 people in over 30 countries, secured a 51.1 percent interest in LRF, and acquired the remaining 49.9 percent for $64 million the following year. IHS, which makes 70 percent of its revenues selling subscriptions to business, government and defense information, collected $1.3 billion in 2011. It is headquartered in Englewood, Colorado, USA,¹⁵ more than 1500 kilometers from the nearest sea port.

IHS Fairplay is now the owner of the Register, and as such has inherited Lloyd’s special relationship with IMO regarding the registration of vessels. For IMO to withdraw from that relationship would require an arrangement with another registry service, if any can be found with the comprehensiveness bequeathed by Lloyd’s; or an extensive coordination among the separate registries, as is attempted in Equasis; or the building of its own database from the ground up.

Whatever valid options there are should address the ship type complexities recently resolved by “Statcode 5,” Among its more than 60 variables for recording ship information, the “ship type” field in Lloyd’s Register employed a popular 4-column system known as the Statcode. IHS Fairplay determined that this system did not go into enough detail for individual vessels, but that it was too widely used in the industry to be discarded. Thus, Statcode 5 adds a fifth column to the existing code. According to IHS Fairplay, the benefits of Statcode 5 are that it is:

●      easy to use, versatile, expandable and flexible

●      allows users to perform both simple and complex interrogation across all levels

●      allows specific micro-analysis

●      works in sympathy and enhances existing systems and time-series legacies

●      allows for even further cross-section analysis using new back in coding system

●      will be provided with a full set of vessel type definitions to assist with accurate selection of codes

Fairplay states that its new code has been vetted by “key clients and members of the International Maritime Statistics Forum.” Effective in 2012, “it is already being incorporated into [IHS Fairplay] products and all new data production requests are being supplied as Statcode 5 compliant.”16

Meanwhile, IHS Fairplay continues to provide vessel owners with IMO numbers for free, and contributes IMO numbers and portions of its “past and ongoing data collection,” to the Equasis project, which is free to search. Unfortunately for the cause of academic research, Equasis does not permit data mining and can only be searched one vessel or one company at a time. Limited mining for statistical purposes is possible on Sea-web and other commercially available data services. Those other commercial services, as quoted in the intellectual property claim at the opening of this narrative, must have IHS Fairplay’s prior written consent to offer IMO numbers in their product.

Notes:
1. "Unique Registered Owner and Company Identification Number Scheme: Permitted Use of Numbers," IMO Numbers LR Fairplay (c2012): http://www.imonumbers.lrfairplay.com/datause.aspx.

2. IHS Fairplay, “About Lloyd's Register - Fairplay”, Sea-Web (c2012): http://www.sea-web.com/about.html.

3. IHS Fairplay, “Lloyd's Register Fairplay: what's in a name?” Brochure (London: 2008?): http://tinyurl.com/Lloyds-Name; Lloyd's Register Group, "Frequently asked questions,"Lloyd's Register (London, c2012): http://tinyurl.com/Lloyds-Register-history.

4. Lloyd's Register Group.” Infosheet no. 34: Researching the earliest registers,” Lloyd’s Register (London: 2011.) http://tinyurl.com/Lloyds-searching.

5. “Fairplay (magazine),” Wikipedia (last modified 29 Aug 2010): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairplay_(magazine).

6. “What’s in a name?” op. cit.

7. Lloyd's Register Group., “Infosheet no. 45: Lloyd’s Register/International Maritime Organisation Numbers,” Brochure, Lloyd's Register (London: 2011): http://tinyurl.com/Lloyds-Number.

8. LLoyd’s Register Group, “Frequently Asked Questions,” op. cit., http://tinyurl.com/Lloyds-standard.

9. Lloyd's Register - Fairplay, Register of ships: 2007-08. Vol. T-Z. (Surrey: Lloyd's Register - Fairplay c2007), pp. iv-xii.

10. International Maritime Organization, “IMO. Res. A.600(15): IMO ship identification number scheme,” (London: 19 Nov., 1987): http://tinyurl.com/Res600.

11. "IMO numbering scheme". IMO Circular letter no. 1886/Rev 3 (London: 2011):  http://tinyurl.com/IMO-Circ1886.

12. "IMO requirement for ship number will cost $25 M." Balitang Marino (accessed 7 Aug. 2012): http://www.balitangmarino.com/000958.html.

13. “About Equasis,” Equasis (c2011): http://tinyurl.com/equasis-providers, http://tinyurl.com/equasis-participation.

14. “IHS Fairplay Register of Ships,” IHS  (2012): http://www.ihs.com/products/maritime-information/ships/register.aspx; “IHS Fairplay Sea-web,” IHS (2012): http://www.ihs.com/products/maritime-information/ships/sea-web.aspx

15. IHS annual report 2011: http://tinyurl.com/IHS-Annual-2011.

16. Lloyd’s Register - Fairplay, “Setting Industry Standards,” IHS Fairplay (c2012): http://www.ihsfairplay.com/about/imo_standards/Setting_Industry_Standards.pdf.