With the appellate court’s rejection of the district court’s decision in the Georgia State University fair-use case, we have yet another twist in this six-year-long saga of copyright litigation. It’s clearly a setback for GSU–but what about for fair use?
Three different items recently published discuss the current state of thinking about discovery tools for purposes of research. Which one captures the right mindset? What should content providers be doing to support discovery?
A drone’s eye view of Toronto’s spectacular new library.
At the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair this year, a pre-meeting session was held called CONTEC. This follow-up to the much beloved, but now defunct, O’Reilly Tools of Change conference brought together an interesting mix of leadership from traditional […]
Guest Chef Phill Jones takes a look at an often under-recognized population of researchers and suggests why publishers should give them more attention.
Since the late 1990s there have been two drivers of growth in STM and scholarly publishing: site licensing and global expansion. As successful as these activities have been, however, we appear to be nearing, if not a peak, at least a plateau. Institutional library budgets have not kept pace with the growth in global research output. At the same time, institutional market penetration is nearing saturation for many publishers.
So the question is, where is the growth going to come from?
Libraries do not have the luxury (or the mission) of selecting books solely based on their intrinsic quality. In order to do their work, the students and scholars served by the library need access to books that are highly relevant to their interests. How do the variables of quality and relevance interact with each other when it comes to library book purchasing?
Guest Chef Elisabeth Jones offers a critical analysis of a widely-distributed statistical chart that seems to show a doubling in the unit cost of monographs since 1985.
A look back at some of Rick Anderson’s insightful pieces on the economic realities of journal prices and library budgets.
The competition among the largest journal publishers to acquire the rights to professional society publications is very keen. The bidding for these publications is likely to result in an alteration of strategy, whereby the bidding publishers seek to bind the societies more closely to them.
Could a Kindle Unlimited subscription replace your local library? What can scholarly publishers learn from Amazon’s tactics here?
How much of the book usage in a research library collection involves books from university presses? Findings from this case study suggests that the answers are complex and, to some degree, suprising.
The Authors Guild’s lawsuit against HathiTrust over the latter’s massive library of digitized print books has been dismissed by the Second Circuit Court. What does this mean for libraries, authors, and readers?
NISO has released the results of their year long study of Altmetrics in draft form for comment.
A study of sales data for 2012 imprints from the University of Chicago Press offers tantalizing hints about the importance (or lack thereof) of library sales to university presses — particularly with regard to scholarly monographs.