From the monthly archives: July 2008

Irrational publishing and recursive publics

On July 31, 2008 By

A courtesy “heads up” from Ellen Duranceau, a scholarly communications colleague at MIT, alerted me to this podcast about scholarly communications with Dan Ariely, the author of the fascinating and best-selling book “Predictably Irrational.” This 20 minute interview is well worth the time for both librarians and scholarly authors who are concerned [...]

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Copyright reform — what would “green” copyright look like?

On July 25, 2008 By

My wife frequently accuses me of finding copyright and other intellectual property issues everywhere, often where no “normal” person would perceive such a question. So I was both surprised and vindicated to see discussions of “green” copyright in a couple of places recently; surprised because even with all my obsessing about copyright, I had never [...]

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Where should we spend our money?

On July 21, 2008 By

The attention paid in the last few weeks to the cost of textbooks and the promise, as well as the risk, of moving to e-texts has prompted me to consider the above question.

Some of the recent reportage has focused on e-textbooks as a way to reduce the costs students must pay for course materials; [...]

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Making Elsevier look good

On July 16, 2008 By

For many years, Dutch publishing giant Elsevier has been a kind of bête noir for academic librarians, serving as principal whipping-post for the exorbitant price increases that have been strangling off the scholarly communications system for over 20 years. But the ground has shifted somewhat, and we have recently observed some academic press and [...]

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What can best practices do for us?

On July 11, 2008 By

As promised, I want to look at a different kind of “new tool” to help users of copyright-protected content figure out what they can and cannot do as they work on new creations.

Best practices are a relatively new phenomenon in the copyright environment. The Center for Social Media at American University, a joint project [...]

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New tools for recording copyrights

On July 9, 2008 By

Several new tools have recently become available to make copyright record keeping and searching somewhat easier, although it still is not what could be called simple. Perhaps more importantly, another set of “best practices” in fair use has been issued by The Center for Social Media at American University, which offers the opportunity to comment [...]

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How “real” is intellectual property?

On July 3, 2008 By

Toward the end of a session on copyright at the American Library Association’s annual conference last week, Carrie Russell, who is the Director of the ALA’s Program on Public Access to Information, exhorted the audience never to speak about copyright “ownership.” “Rights holders,” she said, do not own anything at all; holding IP [...]

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