Currently viewing the category: "Scholarly Publishing"

Of groundhogs and sequoias

On May 11, 2012 By

Lately my life has had a certain resemblance to that of Bill Murray in the movie “Groundhog Day.”  Like Murray, I seem to be repeating the same pattern in my daily work life over and over.

The basic pattern is this.  I am asked, often with a colleague or two, to meet with a faculty [...]

Continue Reading →

Seeking a boundary

On April 10, 2012 By

Is it just me, or do there seem to be a lot of lawsuits filed by publishers in the higher education space recently?  It is increasingly obvious that the disruption caused by the digital environment has led publishers to embrace litigation as a strategy for protecting their business models, and that that strategy cannot be [...]

Continue Reading →

Dueling metrics?

On April 1, 2012 By

One of the interesting consequences of the rapid growth of open access to scholarship — a consequence that I, at least, did not see coming — has been some degree of competition, from the perspective of authors, between open access platforms.  In this short article from AALL Spectrum, James Donovan and Carol Watson address a [...]

Continue Reading →

An extraordinary week

On February 29, 2012 By

It has been an extraordinary week for open access advocates, and it is only Wednesday!  For those keeping score, here is a recap of events, along with some commentary.

On Monday, Elsevier issued a press release withdrawing its support for the Research Works Act.  The RWA, of course, was a bill proposed in the [...]

Continue Reading →

Debating derivatives

On February 27, 2012 By

During a recent visit to another university, I got into an interesting discussion with students about the difference, if there is one, between derivative works, the exclusive rights in which are reserved to copyright holders, and transformative fair uses.  The latter, of course, are considered “not infringement.”  The class of graphic arts students that attended [...]

Continue Reading →

What were they thinking?

On February 17, 2012 By

When the Chronicle of Higher Education ran this story about the relatively new intellectual property policy at the University of Louisiana, one of my colleagues reacted with the question in my title.  It is a valid thing to ask — how did the University system think this was going to go when they drafted [...]

Continue Reading →

Grasping at straws

On February 14, 2012 By

Last week, “Inside Higher Ed” ran an article about the release by the White House of all the comments submitted to the Office of Science and Technology Policy in response to their request for information about public access to federally-funded research.  I was gratified to see that they chose to quote from the comments [...]

Continue Reading →

Why boycott Elsevier?

On January 31, 2012 By

The snowballing petition on which scholars pledge to boycott Elsevier is gaining a good deal of attention.  There is an article in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education, and this more general article about the future of Elsevier’s business model from Forbes.  As of today the boycott pledge has over 2100 signatures.

As [...]

Continue Reading →

Who do you work for, faculty author?

On January 25, 2012 By

In two recent blog posts, one describing the original dilemma and one his decision about it, Professor Steven Shaviro discusses his experiences trying to publish an essay in a collection that was being prepared by Oxford University Press.  He balked at the contract he was offered, and ultimately decided not to publish in [...]

Continue Reading →

An interesting experiment

On January 17, 2012 By

The announcement from JSTOR of their new “Register & Read” program, reported here in Inside Higher Ed and here in The Chronicle of Higher Education, seems like a promising experiment.  It deserves both praise and a couple of caveats, I think.

The first caveat is that it may be a rather small experiment; [...]

Continue Reading →