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 [...]
Posts under ‘Publishing’
Google Books Settlement: Now featuring me
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
A few thoughts on the Google Books Settlement
So much ink has already been spilled on the topic of the Google Books Settlement that I won’t dwell on it too much. I do, though, want to point out a few issues that haven’t been getting much play in the discussion:
The settlement only applies to books which are in copyright as of January 5, [...]
Guest post on 1 year of NIH open access
The NIH Public Access Policy took effect on April 7, 2008. I have a guest post at Science Progress looking at the policy after a year in implementation.
On jurisdiction; or, letting copyright trump science
Rep. John Conyers has released his response to the widely-circulated open letter by Lawrence Lessig and Michael Eisen criticizing Conyers’ anti-open access bill, H.R. 801. Eisen, Steven Harnad, and Peter Suber have already responded ably to Conyers’ response. There’s one thing I would add:
[Conyers:] My bill would restore longstanding federal copyright policy in this area. [...]
