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 [...]
Posts under ‘Open access’
OA + POD + competition?
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, [...]
Funding a transition to OA
As I mentioned in my last post, a group of American universities has signed an agreement to finance open access journals. The previous post alluded to my criticisms of the compact and I’ll flesh them out here.
It’s a big step forward and Harvard has already followed up on its commitment. I hope to see the [...]
Lead, follow, or get out of the way
Harvard and 4 other universities did something neat recently: they agreed, in principle, to help finance open access publishing. Of course, the devil’s in the details (more on that in a future post), not least of which is that, at the time of the agreement, none of the schools had actually dedicated any money to [...]
Science Next book release in DC
Science Next, an anthology of essays from Science Progress, was released this month by Bellevue Literary Press. The anthology includes my essay on the NIH Public Access Policy, “Public Science”. The Center for American Progress will be hosting a release event for the book in Washington, DC on May 1. I’ll be there. If you’re [...]
Unchaining the library
Browsing Wikipedia today, I found a page with an intriguing title: chained library:
A chained library is a library where the books are attached to their bookcase by a chain, which is sufficiently long to allow the books to be taken from their shelves and read, but not removed from the library itself. This practice was [...]
