In a decision that may have deep and wide-ranging implications for the publishing industry and for future applications of the fair use doctrine, Judge Denny Chin has dismissed the Authors Guild’s eight-year-old lawsuit against Google over its Google Books project.
The PMC NAC, facing controversies about its oversight functions and seeing the focus of its oversight embroiled in a public scandal, said nothing about these topics at its latest meeting.
A long, thoughtful essay by a UK academic contemplating open access merits attention, for obvious and subtle reasons.
Using free government infrastructure that’s not available to everyone else raises questions of fairness, which lead to questions of harm. But who is harmed may be both obvious and subtle.
New documents show that the Director of the NCBI was deeply involved in getting eLife launched on PubMed Central, that NLM staff were uneasy about the shortcuts taken to make it happen, and that eLife was largely driving the bus throughout.
An interview from April 2012, which remains as relevant today in explaining the incentives driving much of the behavior in academic research centers and scientific and scholarly publishing.
Why does PubMed preferentially link to PMC versions in its search result lists? Emails from 2011 suggest it’s specifically to generate more traffic to PMC and show off NLM services.
Patents generating millions in revenues for Princeton University leave Princeton, NJ, feeling like it’s carrying an unfair burden. Now, the courts are going to weigh in.
Why do ebooks—and e-information generally—cause such teeth-grinding rage and rhetorical hysteria in some people?
Recent comments on a post about Gold OA in the UK dissected a lot of assertions we commonly see, and bear a closer reading.
While open access remains a hot topic in our industry, we may not be discussing the most difficult aspects. Worse, OA proponents themselves may not be answering some of the questions that are now arising as a broader swath of academics, scientists, and administrators become aware of OA.
New evidence suggests that US taxpayers are not the major beneficiaries of the NIH Public Access Policy, and that even within the NIH, there has been some unease about the situation.
In this “Stick to Your Ribs,” we revisit a post by Joe Esposito about not-for-profit governance, and the broader concept of the value of expertise.
A new book about the role of governments in long-term R&D and market-creation functions should send shockwaves through the political system over the coming decades. Fortunately, you can read it now.
Librarian Jeffrey Beall talks about his list of predatory open access journals, the potential pitfalls of article-level metrics, and more.