Rick Anderson is Associate Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication in the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah. He has worked previously as a bibliographer for YBP, Inc., as Head Acquisitions Librarian for the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and as Director of Resource Acquisition at the University of Nevada, Reno. He serves on numerous editorial and advisory boards and is a regular contributor to the Scholarly Kitchen. He has served as president of the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG), and is a recipient of the HARRASSOWITZ Leadership in Library Acquisitions Award. In 2015 he was elected President of the Society for Scholarly Publishing.
Thanks to a major new international research study, it’s no longer possible to pretend that predatory journals are not a serious problem that needs serious attention. The question is: do we have the will to confront it?
An author found that the relevant journals were unwilling to publish an article of historical research that found evidence for a surprising and somewhat controversial proposition about the founding of the University of Utah. So what did she decide to do with her article? Something rather unusual, it turns out.
Is copyright infringement malum prohibitum (wrong only because it’s prohibited) or malum in se (morally wrong in and of itself)? Interestingly, scholcomm commentators and legal reference materials often characterize it as the former–while both statute and case law treat it like the latter, classifying it as “property theft” and regularly awarding its victims both statutory and punitive damages.
How can secrecy and openness most productively coexist when it comes to the intellectual property of universities and their research faculty? Some thoughts from the new vice president for technology and venture commercialization at a Tier 1 research university.
In 1940, the AAUP published a Statement on Academic Freedom. In 2018, it’s time for it to be updated–and some items clarified.
The challenges posed to record labels by Napster in the late 1990s and early 2000s resemble those posed by Sci-Hub to scholarly publishers today. But which of those resemblances are real, and which are misleading?
The challenges posed to record labels by Napster in the late 1990s and early 2000s resemble those posed by Sci-Hub to scholarly publishers today. But which of those resemblances are real, and which are misleading?
The NIH is warning its funded authors against publishing in predatory journals, and the FTC has secured a preliminary injunction against OMICS for alleged predatory publishing practices. Will this mark a turning point in the fight against fraudulent scholarly publishing?
Ideally, we want science and scholarship to be not only available to the general public, but also comprehensible to them. But the challenges to doing so are real, and may vary both by discipline and by study type.
Knowledge Unlatched has announced its “transformation into a central open access platform.” What does that mean, exactly? An interview with Managing Director Sven Fund.