A nonprofit group called Knowledge Unlatched, has come up with a new model for publishing open access books. In this model, libraries pick titles they would like to be open access and pay a title fee for each of those books. Those fees are meant cover the cost of publishing… read more
Lawrence Lessig lawsuit
Fair use got a win with Lawrence Lessig’s lawsuit against an Australian record label. Lessig used clips of a song by Phoenix in a lecture that was posted on YouTube. Liberation Music, the label representing Phoenix, issued a take-down notice for the lecture and then threatened to sue when Lessig… read more
Royal Society launching OA journal
The Royal Society of London will launch a new open access journal this fall, Royal Society Open Science (RSOS). RSOS will operate similarly to PLoS One, meaning it will publish research in all areas of science and mathematics and will base peer review on quality of the research, not novelty… read more
Cultural Anthropology Journal goes OA
The Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA) recently announced that their flagship publication, Cultural Anthropology, would be going open access (OA). Their parent organization, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) had negotiated with Wiley-Blackwell to allow the SCA to become OA even though AAA has a publishing contract with Wiley-Blackwell that runs… read more
Economics of the Scholarly Communication Ecosystem
On January 31st, we had a discussion that was open to all library staff about the Economics of the Scholarly Communication Ecosystem. Those of us in the Open Access Group had been reading about the economics behind open access (OA) publishing, traditional, toll-access publishing, and hybrid publishing. We hoped the discussion… read more
Omnibus Appropriations Bill improves public access to research
The Omnibus Appropriations Bill that was recently passed by Congress, included a provision that will greatly improve access to taxpayer-funded research. Under the bill, federal agencies (with research budgets more than $100 million per year) within Labor, Health, and Human Services and Education will be required to provide the public… read more
The Simpsons teach us about copyright
I was getting caught up on my Hulu backlog and found a very funny episode from the Simpsons about movie piracy and copyright infringement. It does a good job of poking fun at the extreme lengths Hollywood (and our government) will go to protect the profits from the movies they… read more
Public Domain Day
January 1st of every year is Public Domain Day. This is a day to celebrate the items that have entered the public domain. In the United States, we’ll have nothing to celebrate this year, as nothing will enter the public domain until 2019. That is because the 1976 Copyright Act… read more
SCOAP3 starting January 1st
SCOAP3 will start operations on January 1st, 2014. SCOAP3 is a partnership among libraries, funding agencies, and research centers. SCOAP3 works with publishers to make key journals in high energy physics open access. Partners of SCOAP3 pay into a central fund that is then used to pay the publishers for… read more
Posting articles online
Faculty and researchers have a long practice of sharing their published articles. For a long time this was done through personal requests – via mail, telephone, and email – but for the past ten to fifteen years, faculty have been posting copies of their journal articles on either personal webpages… read more
