With the passing away of Seiji Sato, on 19 January, 2012, the former President of Ohmsha, Tokyo, the STM Community has lost one of its most colorful members. Seiji-san joined his company in 1949 as a 15 year old schoolboy, earning a living while studying. He was appointed Director of the Publishing Department in 1981, in which company unit a large number of engineering textbooks and high circulation reference works were published. Since its foundation in 1914 Ohmsha had played a leading role in Japanese engineering and academic publishing. In parallel with rapid promotions (Managing Director 1985, Senior Managing Director in 1988, and President in 1990), Seiji-san undertook the company's first steps towards international business. This included annual exhibitions at the Frankfurt Book Fair starting in 1980. He also personally attended all the subsequent FBF's up to and including 2009.



Seiji-san became STM Executive Board member in 1994, and Chairman of the Japanese Chapter the following year, the same year he was elected IPCC member. This was followed in 1996 by the launch of the STM Japan News  and the STM Japanese Chapter Inauguration Seminar in Tokyo. In 1998 he chaired the IPA Fourth International Copyright Symposium in Tokyo.



His international endeavors included the formation in the mid-nineties of the typesetting and publishing company BOKTP in Beijing, a joint venture involving Ohmsha, Science Press and IOS Press. Around the same time followed the joint venture,  AKA, Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, in Berlin, also involving IOS Press. Seiji-san held Board positions in BOKTP and AKA as well as IOS Press. He was an ardent traveler, visiting Europe and the US at least once a year, Beijing and Seoul several times per year, in addition to a large number of other destinations - often in connection with STM Association business. He was mostly accompanied on his travels by his long time interpreter, Ms. Motomi Sato. As President of Ohmsha Seiji-san was succeeded by his deputy, Mr. Osami Takeo.



We foreign contacts of Seiji-san remember him as a warm-hearted, generous, always good-humored friend of  STM colleagues in all parts of the world. We all miss him very much.



Einar H. Fredriksson, February, 2012


Yesterday, an international alliance of publishers and publishers’ associations achieved an important success in the combat against internet piracy. Despite significant technical and legal obstacles, the alliance was able to locate the alleged operators of both the sharehoster service www.ifile.it and the link library www.library.nu, and successfully served judicial cease- and-desist orders on both.

http://bit.ly/wo6AOy

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Dr Milne is a publishing professional with more than 20 years experience in Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) publishing. After completing his PhD in computational structural engineering at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, he joined Pergamon Press as a publishing editor responsible for a portfolio of engineering books and journals.

http://bit.ly/AwKZg6

Doyle’s bill, Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) of 2012, would require federal agencies with an “extramural” research budget of $100 million or more to “make federally-funded research available for free online access by the general public, no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal,” according to a statement on Doyle’s website.

The bill would also require that the “manuscript is preserved in a stable digital repository … that permits free public access, interoperability, and long-term preservation.”

http://bit.ly/y0UOb6

The outlook, unsurprisingly, is fairly grim. Almost all European Union countries have committed to reducing their expenditure on universities, while many research budgets have been slashed as Brussels tightens fiscal restraints on debt-laden countries.

The latest round of public sector cuts in Italy, the Republic of Ireland and Spain, announced in December, illustrates the problems faced by the higher education sectors in the ­countries hit hardest by austerity measures. In Spain, the new conservative government led by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy in December outlined the biggest public spending cuts in the country’s history – $11.8 billion. While the force of the blow to higher education is not yet known, hundreds of millions will be taken from education overall, and from assistance to local authorities – key supporters of universities.

http://bit.ly/wHvZZU

The vast majority of Internet usage is still tied to desktop PCs, the data shows. Yet in the fast-growing mobile space, the name that dominates the PC world, Microsoft, is invisible. Nokia remains the leading mobile vendor worldwide, but the Web page-view numbers show a company in decline over the past year, as is Research in Motion, when compared to Apple. The growing mobile operating systems are iOS and Android.

In the US market, the dominance of iOS and Android is much more pronounced compared to all other rivals.

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In a press release this morning, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tx) announced that the House Judiciary Committee is suspending a planned mark-up for the Stop Online Piracy Act, a bill that would have created new powers to target foreign “rogue” websites.

http://bit.ly/yCuZRC

The PEER Economics Research Team headed by Professor Paola Dubini, ASK Research Center, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy has completed the economics research commissioned by PEER.

PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) is investigating the effects of the large-scale, systematic depositing of authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts (so called Green Open Access or stage-two research output) on reader access, author visibility, and journals, as well as on the broader ecology of European research.

http://www.peerproject.eu/reports