Google wins in court (again) as the Second Circuit of Appeals rules that its mass book digitization program qualifies as fair use. But Google is a commercial entity! And their files might get hacked! And their library partners are even more susceptible to copyright pirates than Google is! Yes, said the court, but. . .
New scholarly-communication initiatives have to do more than just demonstrate proof of concept: they have to demonstrate ongoing sustainability (what we might call “proof of program”) and the ability to create desirable products in the amounts needed (what we might call “proof of scale”). What do these look like when they’re achieved, and how are some recent initiatives doing?
A collaborative venture between Oxford University Press and the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library exemplifies a new approach to library publishing, one that could be replicated elsewhere with relative ease and that offers potentially huge benefits to scholarship.
Predatory publishing is a big and complex problem; so is calling out and shaming deceptive publishers by means of blacklisting. Is that something we should even do, and can it be done fairly, constructively, and helpfully? Yes, and here are some suggestions how.
As the scholarly communication world becomes more complex and the issues we deal with become more politically and emotionally fraught, it becomes increasingly essential that we be able to tell the difference between anlaysis and advocacy. What markers can we look for to help us discriminate between them?
Submitting articles for publication is a nightmare–there’s a plethora of platforms and interfaces, and they all seem to be awful. Can anything be done?
Rick Anderson interviews Deni Auclair, VP and Lead Analyst for Outsell Inc., about the recently published report “Open Access 2015: Market Size, Share, Forecast, and Trends.”
Revisiting Rick Anderson’s 2013 post on what the options for the academy to take control of scholarly publishing, and whether any of those options seems feasible.
Those who argue that “predatory” behavior is not only a problem among author-pays OA publishers have a good point. But this raises another question: is the term “predatory” itself really useful in the context of scholarly communication?
ROARMAP, a deeply flawed and often misleading international registry of open access “mandates,” has now been completely revamped–and the result is a much more informative and reliable resource.
The HathiTrust archive now contains 5 million digitized books that are in the public domain and are freely available to all. Do we recognize how significant that is?
Boundless Textbooks used to offer free alternatives to popular and expensive college texts, using information available on the open Web. Then came the inevitable lawsuit, and an out-of-court settlement. What does the Boundless program look like now?
The last remaining lawsuit brought by Edwin Mellen Press founder Herbert Richardson against librarian Dale Askey has now reportedly been settled.
The University of California Press has announced two new open access publishing initiatives, one a monographs program and the other an OA mega journal. Here UCP director Alison Mudditt answers some questions posed by the Kitchen about these new initiatives.
There’s no such thing as “too big to fail,” and this applies to libraries as much as it does to car makers, steel companies, and search engines. My guess is that Ozymandias never saw it coming.