MIT Libraries and the Royal Society of Chemistry have signed a license agreement that is the first of its kind in North America. The agreement will provide access to Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) articles for the MIT community, and will also make all RSC articles authored by MIT researchers open… read more
OA Week 2018 theme announced
The theme for Open Access Week 2018 was announced earlier this week – Designing Equitable Foundations for Open Knowledge. OA Week this year will be October 22nd-28th. You can find more information about OA Week on their website. In the past UT Libraries has participated with both online and in-person… read more
Swedish libraries walk away from Elsevier deal
Y’all may have already seen the announcement last week that the Bibsam Consortium in Sweden has decided not to renew their agreement with Elsevier. The Bibsam Consortium negotiates license agreements on behalf of Swedish universities, government agencies, and research institutes. The Swedish government has set a goal of immediate open… read more
June brown bag discussion
For our June discussion we’ll be talking about information security, privacy, social media, and algorithmic culture and how all those things are impacting our society. If you’d like to read up on any of this before the June event, here are some helpful resources. Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us… read more
Petition against new machine learning journal
A large group of scholars has signed a petition protesting the creation of a new subscription journal from Nature, Nature Machine Intelligence. https://openaccess.engineering.oregonstate.edu/home They argue that most journals in the field are open access with no charges for readers or authors. The people signing the petition have said they will… read more
Florida State cancels big deal
Florida State University has announced it’s canceling it’s “big deal” journals package with Elsevier. The dean of university libraries, Julia Zimmerman, released a statement about the cancellation. Instead of the big deal, FSU will subscribe to a sub-set of journals that are most-needed. The Faculty Senate voted unanimously to approve… read more
Image of Research winners announced
Brown bag for May
For our May scholarly communication brown bag event, we’re going to be showing one of the keynote addresses from Electronic Resources & Libraries – Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects People and Undermines Democracy by Siva Vaidhyanathan. When: Tuesday, May 8th at 12:00pm Where: PCL 1.124 You can get a sense of the… read more
French Universities say goodbye to Springer
It looks like a national consortium of French academic institutions, Couperin.org, has decided to cancel their subscriptions to Springer Journals. They had been in negotiations with Springer for over a year, but were unable to come to an agreement on price. Couperin.org was advocating for a subscription price reduction due… read more
Funding for open textbooks
The omnibus bill that passed both the House & Senate last week and was signed into law included a $5 million provision for an open textbook grant program. This money will be awarded to higher education institutions as part of a competitive grant process. The call for proposals will likely… read more
