Whose Dissertation Is It, Anyway?

Another association of historians has recommended that students be allowed to impose limited embargoes on their dissertations. And so the question arises again: whose work is the dissertation, and who should control it?

What is Kudos? An Interview with David Sommer, Co-Founder

If there was a word of the year competition for Scholarly Publishing, #Altmetrics would be a favorite to win. David Sommer, co-founder and Director of Kudos discusses how this new service could offer usable measurements of the array of article promotion and influencing activities undertaken by scholars.

Parting Company with Jeffrey Beall

Although Jeffrey Beall has done us all a good service by coming up with his list of predatory publishers, his arguments against open access publishing have become shrill and reveal that he is expressing a political viewpoint that obscures the many gradations of opinion concerning scholarly publishing.

The End of an Era for Academia.edu and Other Academic Networks?

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Elsevier has issued a sweeping series of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take down notices regarding Elsevier-published content to Academia.edu, a file-sharing network for researchers and other academics.

This has prompted a storm in the Twittersphere, a response from Elsevier, a number of commentaries on blogs and list-serves, and a truly bizarre article from CNET. Academia.edu for its part is reportedly encouraging authors of affected papers to sign this Elsevier boycott petition despite the fact that their own terms of use prohibit the posting of content that infringes on the copyright or license of publishers such as Elsevier.

Is this a footnote or the end of a chapter in the annals of digital science publishing?