Currently viewing the category: "Scholarly Publishing"

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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; [...]

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Breaking technology

On January 5, 2012 By

In the past few weeks I have seen several news reports and other actions that seem to form a pattern, where the traditional publishing industry has set out to break digital technologies in order to preserve their traditional business models.

Of course, the most radical effort to break the Internet so that it does not [...]

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How to COPE

On November 26, 2011 By

Recently I have had the opportunity to review the first 14 months of Duke’s COPE fund, and it has been an interesting exercise.

COPE, of course, is the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity, a plan by which academic libraries create funds to help faculty authors pay the article processing fees (APCs) that some [...]

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The unexpected reader

On November 15, 2011 By

I have just returned from the Berlin 9 Conference on Open Access, which was held in Washington, D.C. at the lovely conference center facilities of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.   It was a fascinating meeting, and quite different in tone from the one I attended last year in Beijing.

In its opening paragraph, this

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Really, what has Princeton done?

On September 30, 2011 By

When it was announced that the faculty at Princeton University had unanimously adopted an open access policy for scholarly articles they authored, it was great news for the open access community, but it was also the cause of some overheated rhetoric.  Since the operative language of the Princeton policy differs very little from that [...]

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Getting light right

On September 27, 2011 By

The only thing I know about the speed of light is that it comes too early in the morning (which apparently is a quip from American disc jockey Danny Neaverth).  I used to think that I also knew that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light, but my store of certainties has been [...]

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Getting first sale wrong

On August 24, 2011 By

Last week the Second Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a decision with potentially disastrous consequences for higher education.  I admit that I have been reluctant to write about it because I cannot think of a good remedy for the situation and I dislike the role of Chicken Little, always crying that the sky [...]

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