From the monthly archives: July 2007

Hybrid journals and the transition to OA

On July 31, 2007 By

When colleges and universities first started talking about scholarly communications over a decade ago, the context for those conversations was often the so-called “serials pricing crisis.”  Our notions about the system of scholarly communications is now considerably broader and more inclusive now, but the problem of spiraling costs for traditional material is still with [...]

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Advertisements, elitism and open access

On July 26, 2007 By

One of the joys of blogging is the opportunity to relate issues and news items that do not seem to have an obvious connection. Here the only connection is that both involve SSRN — the Social Science Research Network, an open access depository for articles in the social sciences that is a wonderful resource on [...]

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Friday’s bad news

On July 24, 2007 By

UPDATE — What a difference a weekend makes! According to the Chronicle of Higher Education today (Wednesday), Senator Reid has withdrawn the proposed amendment after intense lobbying from the high ed. community. The issue, of course, has not gone away, and lawmakers seem determined to continue to pressure universities as if they were [...]

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Friday’s good news

On July 23, 2007 By

Last Friday was a day of both good news and bad news for higher education on the copyright front.

On the plus side, on Friday we learned that the House of Representatives passed, late Thursday night, a Labor, Health and Human Services and Education appropriations bill that included language to make the public access policy [...]

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Copyright term, open access and the NIH

On July 15, 2007 By

As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education last week, an Oxford graduate student in economics is soon to publish a paper arguing that the “optimal” term of copyright protection is just 14 years. This is vastly shorter than the current term of protection in the US, where the term is life of [...]

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A very expensive blanket

On July 5, 2007 By

Two weeks ago the Copyright Clearance Center announced that it would offer a “blanket” license to college and university campus for permission to copy and distribute copyright protected material to students. The license offers to replace the time-consuming struggle to get and pay for permissions with a single yearly bill. Unfortunately, the blanket licenses [...]

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