I’m at the Students for Free Culture conference, catching up with old friends — including the current leaders of Florida Free Culture, which I realized is 5 years old this month. This morning a phrase popped into my head that I’d never heard before, but could be valuable to the free culture movement going forward: [...]
Cutting carbon doesn’t have to be hard
Generally, I try to keep this blog focused on information policy, but I can’t help myself. I’ve had climate on the brain thanks to Copenhagen, but the confluence of news items that crossed my desk today is striking.
Much of the American media coverage of climate change is of the political back-and-forth about the costs of [...]
OA + POD + competition?
Here’s a question I thought of recently. I’ve asked a few smart people and none of them were sure of the answer, either, so:
There’s a bit of buzz about OA + POD (open access + print-on-demand) as a model for books, particularly for small scholarly publishers like university presses. Consider the following: a book published [...]
Google Books Settlement: Now featuring me
I’ve blogged twice about the Google Books Settlement (here and here), in addition to following it at considerable length on Open Access News. Now, I’m part of it!
A footnote in Pamela Samuelson’s objection tipped me off:
Most other signatories [to the brief] … are members of the Author Subclass by virtue of the book-bound copies of [...]
Nitpicking the Google Books Settlement 2.0
I previously posted on the Google Books Settlement, avoiding the well-trod ground and focusing on points that were salient but hadn’t received much discussion. Now that there’s a new draft of the proposed settlement, I’ll do the same:
The revised settlement cuts out a huge swath of international works. There’s no legal reason for this, since [...]
Happy Open Access Week
In late 2006 or early 2007, I was looking for ways to get students interested in open access. I had started to become versed in the topic myself a few months earlier, after my library announced it planned to cut subscriptions around the same time the Federal Research Public Access Act was introduced for the [...]
Scholarly publishers shake down a copy shop
A group of scholarly publishers — Blackwell, Elsevier, Oxford University Press, Sage, and Wiley — last week won a judgment against a Michigan copy shop for assisting students in copying course packs. The students were copying articles from scholarly journals and chapters from scholarly books for assigned readings in their college classes.
A student wanting a [...]
AcaWiki launches: free summaries of academic papers
As I reported at Open Access News, AcaWiki launched yesterday. The idea is free (gratis, libre), editable (wiki) summaries of academic papers. These summaries might be useful to scan during a literature review or when studying for a class, or they might help make an article comprehensible to a non-specialist (a researcher in another discipline, [...]
