Currently viewing the category: "Scholarly Publishing"

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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When is “exclusive” really not?

On August 19, 2011 By

In our previous post we talked about the relatively easy fair use call involved in the Brownmark Films case decided by the district court in Wisconsin.  Before the court even got to that issue, however, it had to decide a procedural issue that has potential ramifications for scholarly publishing.  Who can grant an [...]

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What does scholarly communications mean to you?

On August 12, 2011 By

Recently I had a somewhat unusual question from a library student who is working in a library where part of her assignment is to look for grant funding opportunities related to developing a scholarly communications program.  After telling me that the whole concept of scholarly communications was somewhat bewildering, the student asked me what search [...]

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Brilliant!

On July 15, 2011 By

Two wonderful resources for academics thinking about public access and open access came to my attention recently, and I want to share them as widely as possible.

The first is this video of a short speech given to the 40th LIBER Annual conference in Barcelona by Neelie Kroes , the European Commissioner for the [...]

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What a mess!

On July 7, 2011 By

Recently my intern Dave Hansen (another lawyer) and I have been looking at the new author self-archiving policies promulgated by the American Chemical Society and Elsevier.  It would be more accurate to say that these policies are anti-archiving; in spite of persistent rhetoric about how committed these publishers are to access to scholarship, the clear [...]

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